The Black Sun

by Jack Williamson

  “That’s the bare bones of it. The reason we’re here. We’d used up the trust fund, which was never very much. I was never able to save anything. The Mission’s dead. My job’s gone. I had no skills for anything else, there’s no future in sight for us here on Earth, and Ninety-nine …”

  She smiled again at the dead gray screen as if she saw something beautiful there.

  “Who knows? We’re on the last seed ship. Beginning the most exciting voyage I can imagine. I can’t wait to see where it ends.” Her voice slowed. “Maybe I wasn’t quite fair to you and Day, but we have a chance—an exciting chance! I hope you’ll try to understand.”

  “It’s okay, Mom.” He stood up to put his arm around her. “I’m glad we came.”

  Still they had to wait. When she turned the holoscreen on again, it was repeating a program about ship discipline and ship security. A woman in a white cap came on to call them down for a quick meal of soya soup and sandwiches. When Kip got sleepy, his mother helped fix his berth. She woke him when the countdown began and buckled the web over him. Still half asleep, Day whimpered for Me Me and crawled into the berth with her.

  “Five minutes to launch.” He pushed the soft plastic plugs into his ears, but still he heard the count. “Four … three … two … one minute …” His mother called to remind him about the blindfold. He put it on and lay waiting for something maybe like a lightning strike. “Thirty seconds … twenty … ten … five …” He shivered and tried to breathe. “Four … three … two … one …”

  He heard a brittle tock, not very loud. The room was very dark when he slipped the blindfold off, but in a moment the screen lit again with a pale green glow. Day was begging again for Me Me, and he felt himself floating off the berth.

  Five

  Boarding Ninety-nine early on the takeoff day, Roak found his chance to leave the device in a supply locker on the gym deck. Down on the engine decks, he listened to the engineers as if he understood all their crisp status reports on the fuel reserve, the fusion reactors, and the quantum propulsion system. Anxious for Andersen’s initials on his clearance certificate, he felt vexed when the big engineer wanted to talk.

  “A funny feeling, saying good-bye.” Seeming to forget the certificate, Andersen offered a muscular hand. “I’ve worked three years here, waiting for my chance to go, but now …” He grinned and scratched his initials when Roak pushed a pen at him. “Sorry to hold you up. It’s just that actually leaving seems so damn final.”

  “Good luck.” Roak gripped his hand. “God be with you.”

  They were his father’s words, and he hadn’t meant to say them. The sound of them gave him an uneasy twinge, but he hurried back to the elevator. With the captain’s signature, he could be off the ship in half an hour, on his way to the Mission office in Las Cruces to file his final report and pick up his final salary check. Nunin was to meet him for dinner and give him the rest of the money when they got news of the blast.

  Fifty thousand, all told. He might look for a clean little motel somewhere on the Gulf coast that would bring in enough to make the payments and give him a living with no hard work. Time for a little fishing and a chance to meet interesting women.

  The control room was a dome-shaped space at the top of the ship, arched with holoscreens that looked out across dust green desert and treeless mountains. The duty officer was Tony Cruzet, a small dark man with a faint foreign accent. Sitting at a silenced intercom, he frowned and shook his head. Roak stood looking out at the snow-dusted hills, trying not to fidget, till Cruzet finally hung up.

  “You’re all clear to take off.” He handed Cruzet the certificate. “If you’ll just sign this for Las Cruces.”

  “No problems?” Cruzet glanced at it, and peered at him too sharply. “Are you sure?”

  “None, sir. Mr. Andersen seems very competent with the quantum system.”

  “He certainly is.”

  “If you’ll sign—”

  “The Mission requires the captain’s signature. I’ll send it down to him.”

  Cruzet rolled the sheet, slid it into a bright metal capsule, dropped it into the com tube beside the elevator, and turned back to his intercom. Roak bit his lip and turned to survey the earth-banked bunker just below and the abandoned construction pads scattered across the desert. The certificate never came back. Still on the muffled intercom, Cruzet ignored him till finally he raised his voice.

  “Sir! Excuse me, but I’ve got to have that certificate.”

  “I know.” Cruzet shrugged. “But Captain Stecker came aboard just this morning. He has ropes to learn. Give him time.”

  “Okay.”

  He muttered the word and scanned the burnt landscape till he had to try again.

  “Mr. Cruzet, please! Can’t you rush it up? I’ve got things to do.”

  “So has the captain.” Cruzet turned briefly from the intercom. “He knows you’re waiting, but he has priorities.”

  He could only stand there, staring down at the workmen demolishing the platform where Alt and Stecker had spoken, till he found a black-capped security officer at his elbow and shuddered at the first chill of dismay.

  “Mr. Roak,” the officer said. “Please come with me.”

  Down on the comcom deck, he followed the officer into the ship security office. The woman at the desk looked too big for the room. She was very black and heavily muscular, her head shaved to the scalp. Zeeland’s device lay before him on the desk.

  “Jonas Roak,” the officer said. “Lieutenant Reba Washburn.”

  After his first startled glance at the device, he looked up into Washburn’s expressionless face and stood as straight as he could, trying for an expression of mild inquiry.

  “We’re still strangers.” Washburn spoke at last, her booming organ voice as bland as her broad face. “But you’ll get to know me. I was born in Ghana. My parents were pioneer Pentecostal missionaries there. Later they were in Brazil and Peru. I saw the results of climatic change. Flood and drought. Famine. Genocide.

  “My father read the Zeeland book and blamed the Mission for everything. If I wouldn’t fight the devil, he wanted me to fight quantum waves in the upper atmosphere. What saved me was not the Holy Spirit, but a bioscience scholarship to Georgia Tech. If you wonder where I come from, Mr. Roak, I’ve been with the Mission since I graduated. I’m on the ship because I came to see how we’ve wasted the planet with the greenhouse gases we’ve been spewing into the atmosphere for the last hundred years.”

  She paused a moment, her dark eyes probing him.

  “As for Fairshare, Mr. Roak, we’ve looked for signs of actual environmental harm from our takeoff flashes. We found none at all.” Her voice sharpened. “Fairshare is a criminal scam.”

  Eyes still averted from the device on the desk, Roak shook his head and allowed himself a puzzled frown. Washburn’s voice fell solemnly.

  “I love StarSeed Mission the way my parents loved God. As for you, Mr. Roak, I’m surprised to see you here. Do you recall the oath you took when you became a launch inspector?”

  “Of course!” He let indignation edge his voice. “If you’ll look at my record—”

  “We’ve had occasion to question your official record, Mr. Roak. We have reason now for a harder look. A few hours ago we had a telephone call from a man we have identified as Mortimer Nunin. He is known to have Fairshare contacts. He warned us of a Fairshare plot.”

  “I’ve met Nunin,” he muttered. “But what are you getting at?”

  “We searched the ship with chemical sniffers, and discovered this.”

  Washburn nodded at the device.

  “Are you accusing me?”

  “I don’t accuse you, Mr. Roak. Not just yet.” Washburn shrugged, muscles rippling under her snug blue jumpsuit. “We’ve found no fingerprints, but the evidence certainly suggests that you were trying to kill us. Tried in fact to murder mankind.”

  “Evidence?” His anger was real enough. “What evidence?”

  “You are t
he last outsider still aboard.” She spoke in a tone of soft reproof. “Mr. Cruzet says you were greatly agitated when he delayed you.”

  Roak was shaking.

  “I’ve got rights,” he shouted. “If I’m suspected, I want a lawyer.”

  “No rights are brought aboard any StarSeed craft. We all sign the covenant that governs us. Rights here must be earned.”

  “I want to see the captain—”

  “Captain Stecker has more urgent duties now. He’s aware of you, but any action must wait till after takeoff.”

  Stunned, he swayed on his feet.

  “You can’t—” he gasped. “You’ve got to let me off.”

  “Too late for that. The locks are already secured.” Washburn nodded at the waiting officer. “Mr. Kellick, take him to the brig.”

  Roak had blacked out once when a gang of black prisoners was working him over in the Huntsville yard. He was swaying giddily now, till Kellick caught his arm very firmly and escorted him back to the elevator. The brig was on the bottom deck, below the engine levels. Kellick took his briefcase, wrote his name in a book, and left him in a narrow steel cell.

  Nine by five, it was furnished with a toilet, a padded steel bunk and nothing else. He sat down on the bunk and mopped his face. Damn Nunin! The greasy thief had sold him out, just to keep his forty thousand.

  He mopped his sweaty face again and sat there waiting for anything to happen. Nothing did. He heard the shuffle of space boots and distant voices he couldn’t understand. At last he lay down on the bunk and tried to sleep, but raw terror kept eating at him. In spite of himself he got up and walked the cell, three steps each way.

  A gong rang at last.

  “All clear!” a speaker brayed. “All clear for scheduled liftoff.”

  He waited at the door, but nobody let him out. He rattled the grill till Kellick came.

  “You’ve got to stop it!” he gasped. “Stop the takeoff, and I’ll tell you where I hid the other bomb.”

  “Washburn would never fall for that.” Kellick laughed. “If you’d had another bomb, you’d have offered the deal right away.”

  “I want to see the captain.”

  “We’ve reported your detention, but I don’t know when he can get to you.”

  Stecker never got to him. Roak paced his narrow scrap of deck, cursing the Mission and Nunin under his breath, till Kellick came back with a cup of water and a bowl of lukewarm chicken-flavored tofusoya stew. He left it on the narrow shelf inside the grill until it turned to a clammy mass that he was eating when Kellick came back for the cup and the bowl.

  “Takeoff alert, Mr. Roak.” He left ear plugs and a blindfold. “The countdown is running.”

  Kellick took his unfinished stew and left him alone in the cell. He walked his bit of deck and lay on the berth and walked again, while the chicken-flavored stuff turned sour in his stomach. He tried to remember what he knew about quantum flight.

  Nothing, really. Nobody knew anything, because nobody had ever come back to talk about it. The blindfold and ear plugs might shield him from a flash and a crash that might or might not happen. The flight might end anywhere, or nowhere at all. Nunin would keep his forty thousand; that was all he really knew.

  Six

  Colin Glengarth was a big, rawboned Scot whose angular bones came down from one Angus Glengarth who had left his native highlands five generations ago to manage a cattle ranch in the Texas panhandle. He’d been happy to go out with Alt on this final flight, and a bitter resentment festered in him now. He kept silent as they took their places at the controls, lying side by side in the pilot seats.

  “Brief me.” Stecker rolled his eyes at the maze of lighted instruments winking red and green all around and over their heads. “It’s ten long years since I went into Mission management. I need a quick review of takeoff and flight control procedures.”

  “Too late for that, sir.” Glengarth was securing his low-gravity restraints. “Launch configurations were all completed and reviewed before the countdown began. We’re now under computer control. Nothing more to do, sir. Not till we’re out of quantum mode.”

  “You mean we just lie here?”

  “Lie there.” The ship now at the mercy of this blundering dunce! Gerald Alt had been his friend since college, a great companion for this ultimate adventure. “Use your ear plugs.” His voice was sharper than he intended. “Cover your eyes. Keep still through the countdown.”

  “I’ve heard Fairshare talk about risks, but our people in promotion always played them down.” A hint of panic sharpened Stecker’s voice. “What are our odds?”

  “Who knows?”

  “All this uncertainty—” Stecker caught himself and muttered, “Not that I’m chicken.”

  You’re a coward, Glengarth thought. Worse than a coward, a thief on the run. A pirate, really, stealing the ship with trumped-up charges against Captain Alt. Stecker and Jake Hinch had robbed and ruined the Mission, and now they were on the run.

  He had been Alt’s pilot on Moon Magellan. Driver of the first Moon Ranger. Surveyor of the Farside site and safety officer there till the Mission called him back to help design the quantum craft. On Alt’s vacations since, they’d got together for wilderness hikes as long as they could find unspoiled wilderness fit for hiking. Memories of those good times ached in him now.

  “Here’s to the Moon!” He remembered Alt lifting a glass of bourbon and water to it one night when they sat watching it over a campfire. “Because its desolation teaches you to love the hills and skies and seas of Earth as it used to be. The Mission will be lucky if we find another planet half its equal.”

  “We can hope,” he had answered.

  Ninety-nine might have reached that goal. Planning the flight, they’d dreamed again of the virgin worlds they hoped to find, perhaps in some undiscovered galaxy, an instant and a billion light-years from Earth.

  Now Stecker and Jake Hinch. Robber barons, Zeeland’s Fairshare newsletters had called them, playing the con game of the century. He and Alt had been slow to believe, even when they saw StarSeed sliding toward bankruptcy and the wrecking crews arriving to break up the unfinished skeleton of what should have been Flight One Hundred.

  “What can I expect?” Stecker nagged again. “When the countdown ends? What then?”

  “Then?” Unintended mockery edged his answer. “We’ll take a look around us. Try to see where we are. Guess, if we can, how far we’ve left our good Earth behind. Look for some possible planet. Go into rocket mode, if we do find any likely object within rocket range.”

  A computer chimed. He called Andersen to begin the oral count. Muttering something Glengarth didn’t try to hear, Stecker adjusted the blindfold and fell silent. The moment came. His breath stopped. His own eyes covered, headphones and safety goggles on, he waited.

  And waited.

  A brittle crack, like a dry twig snapping. Had it happened? No light had flashed through the goggles. Had the takeoff gone wrong? Were they still in the pit?

  He realized that his weight was gone and pulled out his earplugs.

  “Are we—” Stecker’s yelp stabbed through his headphones. “Where are we?”

  He’d tried to imagine the moment. Instant extinction? The deadly blaze of some giant star. A black hole’s invisible drag. Or perhaps their first glimpse of that pristine planet just ahead, lush green continents and clean seas beckoning? He drew a long breath. At least it hadn’t been extinction.

  Hopeful, he pushed the heavy goggles off. Though no actual windows broke the titanium hull, the curved holoscreens created the illusion that the deck was open to the sky. Dead black now, they told him nothing at all.

  Yet the ship seemed intact. Floating against the restraints, he searched the dark till his adjusting vision let stars burn through the darkness. A scattered few at first, soon lost in fields of diamond frost and clouds of glowing gas and swarms of steady suns. He touched the keys to sweep them across the dome as if the ship were turning.

  Orion
?

  Blazing Betelgeuse, the jeweled belt, the hazy fire of the Great Nebula, all twisted out of shape? He touched the keys to stop it overhead, but it couldn’t be Orion. There were too many stars when the cameras swept them, crowded too densely. Earth and its small sun could be nowhere near. They must have come many thousand light-years. His world, his friends, all he had ever known had gone to forgotten dust. No surprise, yet he shivered with a pang of loneliness and loss.

  “What the bleedin’ hell?”

  He heard Jake Hinch’s hoarse bellow from the elevator. Hinch had been the Mission auditor. Stecker’s accomplice, so Zeeland had claimed, and now his fellow fugitive. Outlined against the elevator lights, Hinch was a withered human rat, long-nosed and long-chinned, tilting his bearded head beneath a shapeless black beret as if to peer through his black-lensed sunglasses. Not worth hating, Glengarth thought, but surely not the type for pioneering undiscovered worlds.

  “Where the ruttin’ devil?” he was demanding. “Where’ve we got to?”

  Glengarth had known him since they met in Mission training and still despised him for the lies that had got him there. Despised him for his bald attempts to cheat on tests he couldn’t pass. Despised him utterly for his arrogance since Stecker made him Mission auditor and for his habit of disputing legitimate Mission debts.

  “What the hell stopped us here?”

  Stecker, roving the world to solicit funds for the Mission, had cultivated an easy-seeming if sometimes oily charm. Hinch, the hatchet man, had never needed charm. He preferred raw power. Clinging now to a handhold at the elevator door, he glared through his wide black lenses with the wary hostility of some frightened predator.

  “What next?” he yelled again. “What now?”

  “Take a look.” Glengarth unsnapped the restraints and swung to his feet, fixing his clingfast space boots on the clingfast carpet. He faced Hinch with a small tight grin. “Like what you see?”

  “You say it took a star to stop us?” Clutching with one hand, Hinch snatched the dark glasses off and pointed at the star that wasn’t Betelgeuse. “That’s the star?”