by Jerry
“It won’t make any difference,” said Hudson as he started up the tubular corridor.
“He’s probably right,” growled Koehler in his deep monotonous basso. “We’re lost. I could have plotted our return from M-32; that was all arranged. But from wherever we are now—” He shrugged his huge shoulders.
INSIDE the control chamber, Koehler voiced one booming roar of astonishment, stood staring at the observation screen over the control panel. He stood there with his mouth hanging open, then whispered. “It can’t be—it can’t.”
Conrad and Kaye saw no meaning in the screen, saw only dead blackness spread across with countless billions of lifeless frigid white dots. Hudson wasn’t interested in the screen. His slender hands ran lovingly over the smooth gleaming surface of Kilroy, a big case of hard vacuum, aswirl with electrons and dynamic magnetic fields.
Hudson checked dials, gauges, graphs. “Kilroy’s okay. Nothing wrong with the controls.” That’s what his voice said, noticed Conrad, but his eyes shifted, swirled with little specks of hidden fear. “Yes, I’m sure Kilroy has operated perfectly. But that chronometer—you, Koehler, lover of the stars. What do the stars say?”
“Ahhhh—” groaned Koehler. “Take a good long look at this chart; check it with what you see there on the screen. I’ll have a padded cell rigged up.” They kept on looking.
Koehler cried. “Don’t you see, you idiots? We’re in section 80-epicenter-57! That little light right there happens to be Soil We’re inside Pluto’s orbit now. That’s Earth.”
Conrad managed a harsh aspirate. “It would appear that we have been to M-32 in Andromeda—and back again!”
“But we were in suspended animation,” said Hudson with sudden violence. “You’re crazy; it’s an illusion.”
“I think the evidence is obvious,” said Conrad.
“But someone,” said Hudson nervously, “someone among us had to have wakened to compute the return, reset the controls, replenish the anesthesia capsules, chart our course. And it’s no coincidence, you know, that of all the infinitude of places we might have ended up, we’ve returned directly to Earth.”
He looked at Koehler. “You’re the only one who could have charted our return with such precision, Koehler; let’s have an explanation.”
Koehler’s face reddened. “Okay, Hudson, what about you? You’re the only one who could have worked over Kilroy for the return flight! I didn’t plot any course back to earth, but even if I had, you’re the only one who could have gotten it back here.”
Hudson lunged at Koehler who dodged the blow, grabbed at Hudson’s jacket. Conrad stepped between them. “Relax,” he said.
Kaye’s voice was not too well controlled. “One among us, someone, must have awakened and accomplished the initial work necessary to return this ship. And he must have had a good reason. Doesn’t anyone remember anything?”
No one did.
“Six hundred years—thrown away, lost,” said Koehler oddly. “You’d think we would be glad it turned out this way. But we’re not, are we? We’re scared silly; we’re scared because we know that something happened—something happened in Andromeda.”
2
KOEHLER was in the observation ‘blister’ working over a report. “For whom, or why, I wouldn’t know,” he had said. Hudson was stretched out on his bed reading from a volume he had brought along entitled: Conquest—A History of Man’s Evolutionary Motivation, by Anschull Myers. A monistic, dogmatic work that would appeal only to paranoid thinking like Hudson’s.
Conrad talked with Kaye. Her hand trembled a little as he held it and looked into her eyes; he always found a great deal of strength there.
“Well,” she said. “I can’t find out anything. We’ve all been subjected to both pentathol and hypno-rays, and our unconscious minds seem to be completely blank.”
“But there must have been some processes even after we went into suspended animation,” insisted Conrad. “What kind of censor would block off both pentathol and hypno-rays, Alan? It’s impossible; they’ll dig out anything. Yet, I agree that there must be impressions there. Six-hundred yours—nothingness—one might almost think that life and death and time as we’ve known it is just an illusion like the old mystics were trying to convince every one of when we left Earth.”
“Come off that,” said Conrad with not all mock concern. Then doggedly. “Space-warp, whatever that might be—well, there must be something to explain what happened. We could have been influenced unpredictably by displacement due to intense gravitational pull, or—”
Hudson threw the book aside, jumped to his feet. “But not in six hundred years. That would hardly have allowed us to circumvent a space-warp.”
“I sit corrected,” said Conrad wryly.
“You two console each other,” Hudson snapped; “I’m going into the control chamber and take another look at Kilroy.”
Kaye stared at the panel that closed automatically behind Hudson.
Conrad said. “Don’t you sense that something’s happened that is—well—forbidden? Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? Anyway, I feel like the answer’s in my head, in spite of your pentathol and hypno-rays. But I can’t dig it out.”
Her answer was low; he scarcely heard her. “It must have been so alien there, so far from earth. What was it really like? Where were we, really?” Her voice rose, sharpened.
“Alan—we’ve got to find out where we were. And if we even reached M-32 in Andromeda. What happened there? Why? Why, Alan?”
The panel opened again. Koehler lurched into the room. He stood there, white face staring, his hair a bushy mass. His heavy mouth worked Incoherently, then words spilled out. “Something’s happened to Hudson! In the—control chamber!”
Conrad ran past him, Kaye followed, then Koehler. He heard the big man muttering. “I heard him go in. Then in a little while he—screamed; it sounded very bad.”
Conrad found Hudson sitting on the mesh grid. His eyes bulged with a mad vacant kind of light. His hands pawed around in front of his greenish-white face. He slid back away from Conrad, moaning and crying softly.
“Hysteriform siezure,” said Kaye quickly. “Maybe it’s only temporary—I don’t know. Meanwhile he’s dangerous. I’ll bring a hypo, and while he’s unconscious we can lock him up in the spacesuit locker.”
She returned quickly, efficiently injected Hudson while Conrad and Koehler held him with great effort. After he was locked up, inside the small room aft, Conrad asked Kaye to warm up some concentrates for them to eat before they hit Earth’s atmosphere. Only a matter of a few minutes. He didn’t want her to go with him then into the control chamber.
Koehler walked with Conrad as far as the door into the ‘blister’ where Koehler spent most of his time.
“I checked our course,” he said. “We’re hitting Earth dead center; a bull’s eye. If I didn’t know better I’d say I did chart this return from Andromeda; it was perfect.” He closed the panel between them.’ Conrad went into the control chamber.
HE SAT THERE on the deep foam-rubber mats staring at the observation screen and at the smoothly clicking controls. That odd psychosomatic ache in his head was stronger now; a dull, nameless cold blew through his mind.
He shook it away partly, stared at the screen. That was Earth looming strongly. The ship was still on automatic control, thought Conrad grimly. All in the hands of Kilroy now, just a lot of free electrons; but it was still more reliable than he would be. He could change the ship over to manual, try bringing it in himself. He wasn’t a specialist, though; he knew the principle but not the practical applicational experience. Only Hudson had that, and he was a raving madman.
Conrad gripped the edge of the control panel. He said into the intership audio. “Strap yourselves in your shock chairs as directed. It may be a pretty awkward landing.”
Awkward was hardly the word. Kilroy was constructed to handle everything about the ship, including blast-offs and landings. But Kilroy didn’t have free agency; it couldn’t abstra
ct. They’d probably smash into a charred lump.
Conrad stared awed, at looming Earth, shining twenty times brighter than the reflection from the moon. Black shadows and bright splashes of earthlight contrasted. Behind it the Sun was setting, surrounded by its corona and zodiacal light. The Moon, slightly blue with a white rim, shown behind.
Then the earth grew completely dark except where the Sun splattered down on its far half, a pool of light bright white in its center and radiating outward into dissipating orange and browns.
Conrad said into the intercom. “We’re landing. We’re back—home—” His voice choked off.
After six hundred years. But Earth had grown much older, though they on the ship had not. Evolutionary metabolism had an accumulative speed. After a slow start, it had moved with frightful rapidity. So much could have happened—
Conrad froze. They were low; he could see land looming that he had never really expected to see again. A splotched expanse of faded colors with tendrils of rivers and splashes of lakes faded strange blue. Along the far horizon stretched a blue and yellow mist.
He said with difficulty now into the intercom. “This is it, Kaye. I’m leery about sending an advance notice.
We’ve been away a long time. How the devil do we know what it’s like now? What kind of a reception we’ll get.”
A gigantic mass of green surged across the screen, sullenly flooding it. The automatic controls clicked frantically. The scene in the screen whirled, blurred in a senseless vortex. Nausea gripped Conrad, and he knew there had been a sudden mechanical let-up in acceleration. He felt the ripping bursts of repulsion rocket fire.
Dimly like a sound in a bad dream, he heard the grinding roar. It exploded in his brain. He found himself staggering blindly out of the control chamber. Thick blackness pulled at him as he staggered down the tilted corridor. He fought desperately against the insistent darkness wooing his mind, called for Kaye, many times.
Then he felt her hand, but he saw only a frightened blur that must have been her face. He heard Kohler yell. “Hudson—in the locker! I’ll get him!”
Cold air. He knew they must have gotten out of the ship. Then a blast of heat seared his face as he stumbled over rough ground. Cool air struck his face again. “Kaye,” he said. “Kaye!”
But neither her voice or hand were strong enough. He drifted away, dropped on down into a dense dark; it was soft and nice there. He would stay a while.
l
“Alan!” Conrad would know Kaye’s voice anywhere, even in a displaced nebulae, in some closed Universe, even in Andromeda. If there was such a constellation, such a thing as “time” at all in which you could lose six hundred years, and have it haunt you with some monstrous secret that you had to name, but feared to name—
“Alan, are you hurt badly? Say something!”
He tried to say something. He felt her wet face against his, her soft breath crying over him; and he wanted to say something but he couldn’t.
“Alan—some men—they’ve taken us prisoner. I couldn’t leave you. They have us in some kind of aircraft; they’re taking us somewhere. They won’t say anything. I’m afraid—Alan, please open your eyes!”
He managed it then with great effort. Things went round in a colored mist. Two men over controls . . . a ‘blister’ with clouds rushing past . . . a spherical flying craft . . . wingless . . . moving with silent speed . . . Kaye’s face. . .tears . . .
“Shut up, Kaye. I hate girls who cry.”
He heard her hysterical voice fading away. Her face whirled, got smaller, exploded in a rain of yellow lights. Soft slumber pulled, clung. Numbness crept in. He was drifting gently on clouds of sun-yellow beauty, through splashing craters of color, symphonies of soaring song.
Andromeda, a small voice said.
M-32 in Andromeda.
3
OR HE HAD found Paradise. Men used to believe in Paradise, celestial spheres . . .
There was no familiar sky; it was golden liquid flowing down over a panorama of strange trees with foliage of topaz and sun amber that glistened and shimmered; and splashed with great seas of gigantic flowers of flaming scarlet; immense valleys of curtained mists, trembling rainbows of aureate lights, harlequined with cratered colors.
There was a lovely ‘oneness’, a fusion of form, of colors and music and more material reality in an ecstatic, endless chord, ringing, caroling, calling . . .
Gigantic birds soared through rainbow veils on wings of gleaming emerald, and pale tenuous figures swam in pearly flowing waters and showers of amethystine floods.
Sound, voices, tendrils, pale lovely faces, not human. They traveled with him, down an endless hall of silver light. He could move; he followed their beckoning call. Gentle, sweet voices fondling him with fingers of gentle curiosity.
He felt Kaye near him—but only as a shifting tremulous cloud of freed existence. He knew she was laughing with the sheer joy of unleashed care, and the sound bubbled and tinkled and echoed through the vaulted splendor of the place like the crashing of a million tiny crystalline bells. Where her teeth might have shown he saw only glittering shafts of ivory light.
A delicate petaled face peered wonderingly into his. A small red mouth opened. A little cry of tinkling horror shattered the beauty.
“They will destroy,” the tiny voice said.
The cry rippled away, shimmered and shattered like exploding prisms. “They will destroy!”
Evil Destruction. Destruction, forever.
The luminous, webbed mist suddenly darkened in wavering black veins like spilled ink, running out in darting ragged rivers of despair. The flooding symphonies of carillon song shivered, dimmed into faint dissonances and grating dischords.
A chorus of those alien frightened petal faces cried. Evil. Destruction forever and ever. Until nothing remains.
But only the one is evil. The other three carry the vital seeds that can grow to glory.
But the evil one must die.
The sound and the glitter fused in discordant crescendos of horror. They must die, the evil ones, though they have never learned to live.
It vanished. The great color-splashed forests with its crimson flowers; the jeweled birds; the petal faces and the symphonies of song. A grey suffocation closed over him and choked him in acrid vileness. He smothered and cried out. And then there was only memory that died beneath grey depthless cold.
l
AS HE OPENED his eyes, Conrad wondered if it were a dream. It seemed too alien and too utterly lovely, even for a dream; and it seemed to have no meaning, no possible significance. It wasn’t complete. He blinked his eyes. A big bronzed figure in transparent plastic clothing of a strange design stood there.
Conrad was sitting in a low metallic chair. A heavy helmet was on his head from which thin wire tentacles led away to large gauged units. The man handed him a glass of colorless liquid and said in a barely comprehensible English vernacular. “Drink this; you will feel better.”
Having no reason to doubt him, Conrad complied; meanwhile he studied the big man. His skin was dark, his face angular—not cruel-worse than cruel. It was a completely amoral face. The big man’s two feet added up to only eight toes.
Conrad saw part of the big room. It was gleaming with metal, naked and harsh with no warmth. No warmth anywhere. Everything metal, benches, the machines covered with dials and gauges; there were two large tri-dimensional screens waiting lifelessly on the autoluminescent wall.
The stuff he had drank was potent; the throbbing was gone. The burning fled from his eyes, left them clear and bright. The big bronzed man’s pale, emotionless eyes looked at him without any reaction at all that Conrad could see, unless it were vague distant curiosity.
“Just call me guinea pig,” said Conrad. The man stared. Conrad heard a nervous laugh to his right and behind him. “Kaye!” he turned.
She was in the same predicament as he. In a low metallic chair with a silver helmet covering her violet-black hair. “Thank Mars you’re c
onscious, Alan! I’d about given up hope.”
“I’m all right, Kaye. And you’re looking swell, too.”
The big man mused. “Curious types. It’s odd; your minds resist our probers. But you’ll give in to us eventually. There are many ways remaining.” Conrad still looked at Kaye. Like him, she was bruised, cut, her clothing tattered ribbons. “Kaye, how long have we been here?”
“Just a little while. They’ve been trying to probe our brains. Evidently they’ve found nothing at all. He thinks all that pre-suspended animation content of our minds is only fantasy thinking, that we’ve been intentionally conditioned with meaningless thought to mislead them. He thinks we’re enemies, of course. I—I haven’t told him anything.” Her eyes finished a meaningful message. Don’t talk, Alan. Don’t tell them a thing.
The big man brushed his thin nose with a slender hand. His voice was terse, without color. “You submen—it’s hard to believe you’re descendants of human stock. Living like animals in the forest, ignorant, stupid mystics! Come—what were you doing near Shiva?”
Conrad shrugged. Kaye said. “Shiva, that’s the name of this city.”
“Please,” the questioner said. “Enough pretense.” He turned back to Conrad. “Now. What were you doing out there? We know that you Upinshads are childishly plotting against Shiva. Even though you mystics claim to have nothing to do with material things such as machines, we know you had some kind of weapon out there in the forest. Children can start fires. What were you doing there?”
“I don’t know; really I don’t.”
“You must know. The forest burned for half a mile. What kind of a weapon were you trying to use?”
“I don’t know of any weapon.”
“Where did you get this odd kind of cloth? When did you animals stop wearing the skins of animals?”
Conrad shook his head, studying the man. His questions didn’t hold any real urgency. He wanted to know, but it didn’t really matter. Evidently the Upinshads were far indeed beneath the frigid dignity of the people of Shiva.
