The Black Sun

by Jack Williamson

  He stopped abruptly, with a sharp catch of his breath.

  “Thank you, Mr. Mondragon,” she was saying. “I have to believe you.”

  Hardly listening, he was watching the four security men as they walked past toward another table. Roak saw them and turned to the booth with a tight smile for Rima.

  “Dr. Virili.” He ignored Mondragon and the children. “If I may interrupt for a moment, I should tell you that we’ll have to pull most of the people and equipment out of your habitat project.”

  “Why …” She was speechless for a moment. “Why is that?”

  “We’re opening an excavation on the south beach.”

  “What for?” Anxiety edged her voice. “We surveyed the beach, as you probably know. The seismosonic probes found enormous boulders in the permafrost. The sandstone cliffs in Daybreak Canyon have proved to be a far preferable site—”

  “Not for our purposes.” Blandly, Roak interrupted. “Many of us never liked the notion of living like rats here under the ice. When the survey team failed to find what we wanted on the north beach, we sent them south. They’ve found a site with three hundred meters of clay and a soft sandstone, stuff we can excavate.

  “Plenty for a launch pit.”

  “Impossible! We can’t relaunch.” After a moment she tried to smooth her voice, but Mondragon heard the tension in it. “Ask Mr. Glengarth.”

  “I’ve heard the objections.” Roak shrugged. “It’s true that building a launch facility will strain our resources. True that we have no assurance that any new destination would be better than this one.”

  “Reason enough to reject it.”

  “Not for everybody.” He grinned as if her tone amused him. “Captain Stecker and I have been working with a group of engineers who feel very strongly that any chance whatever is better than anything here.”

  “That’s insane!” her words burst out. “It’s suicide!”

  “One opinion. Not Captain Stecker’s.” He reached to touch her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Rima….”

  “He isn’t!” Kip whispered hotly. “Not a bit.”

  Roak ignored him.

  “I stopped to warn you that our plans for the pit are almost finalized. You’ll get new orders from Captain Stecker. Orders to abort your excavation at once.”

  “Stecker!” Indignation exploded in her. “He’s a drunken idiot, sulking in his cabin! He’s got no right to order anything.”

  “He’s still captain of the ship.”

  “Then tell him the truth!” People around them were turning to look, and she lowered her voice. “Make him listen.”

  “What truth?” He shrugged, blandly ironic. “Our hopeless situation has never been a secret. The question is what we do about it. Captain Stecker has had very competent advice from Krasov and Fujiwara. In fact, a whole team of able quantum engineers—”

  “A team of cowards!” Her voice had flared again, and she paused to calm herself. “Men who sneer at the whole science of terraforming. If you recall, we set out from Earth pledged to establish humankind wherever the waveships happened to take us. Some of us remember that. Ask Mr. Glengarth. Ask Mr. Andersen.”

  She gestured at Andersen and Cruzet. They were listening intently from their own table. Andersen grinned, nodding silently.

  “We’ve been trying to remind the captain,” she drove on, quietly desperate. “To convince him that our only actual chance at long-term survival anywhere is right here. Beginning in a very modest way with the habitat and a hydroponic garden. We’ll have problems, but we can learn by doing. We’ll have to search for whatever resources the planet happens to offer and extend all our efforts when we have the know-how to make extensions possible—”

  She stopped when Roak walked away.

  “Excuse us, Mr. Mondragon.” She rose, shaken and trembling, and turned to the children. “I think we’ve finished eating.” She picked up Day, who was staring after Roak and about to cry, and left the booth.

  Kip looked back to shake his head at Carlos.

  Late that night, Day crawled into Rima’s berth and clung to her, shivering.

  “Help me, Mommy!” she was begging. “I’m afraid!”

  “What’s wrong, baby?” Rima cuddled her. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “The bad thing,” she sobbed. “The bad black thing out on the ice. It got Me Me. Now it’s coming after me.”

  “It can’t hurt you, darling.” Rima sat up on the edge of the berth, rocking her. “You’re here in the ship with me. We’re all of us cozy and safe.”

  “But we’re not safe.” Day stiffened against her. “I see it coming over the ice. Coming to take me. Nobody can stop it.”

  “Mr. Glengarth can,” Rima said. “Dr. Andersen can. Dr. Cruzet can. They went out on the ice, and they came back safe. They are braver and stronger than any bad thing.”

  “Not the black thing.” Her voice grew slow and strange. “It’s worse than anything, because it belongs in the dark and loves the ice and hates everything alive.”

  “Don’t forget Carlos.” In the old jumpsuit he wore for pajamas, Kip had come out of his own curtained berth. “You’re not a baby anymore. Don’t be so silly. You sound like some adventure with Captain Cometeer. Carlos has just been a thousand kilometers out across the ice. He didn’t see your precious panda doll. He didn’t see any black monsters either.”

  “You’re the big silly.” She shivered in Rima’s arms. “You play too many silly games. The bad thing’s real. I see it closer now. It’s coming to take me, the way it took Me Me.”

  “Do you have to be so stupid?” Kip yawned, sleepily scornful. “We’re sealed inside the ship. It has a thick titanium hull. We have brave men to guard us. Like Dr. Andersen and Carlos—”

  “Don’t call me stupe!” Day protested. “You’re the stupe, or you would see the bad thing coming.”

  “We’re all looking for it,” Rima said. “I don’t see anything. Can you tell us what it’s like? Maybe we can help, if you try to tell us what it is.”

  “It looks like …”

  Shuddering, Day whimpered and huddled closer to her.

  “Hold me, Mommy! Hold me tighter! Don’t let him get me!”

  “I’ll hold you, darling. We’ll all protect you, if you can tell us what it looks like.”

  “A man.” Her voice was hushed and faint. “A thing that used to be a man. It’s Mr. Hinch!”

  “Crybaby Daby!”

  “Don’t call her Daby!” Rima scolded him. “You know she hates it.”

  “She ought to know Jake Hinch is dead. Carlos saw the ice gods bury him under the ocean ice a thousand kilometers away.” He made a face at Day. “How can he get here?”

  Trembling in Rima’s arms, her breath a slow, raspy wheeze, Day took a long time to answer.

  “Poor Mr. Hinch!” A strange slow croon. “I see him better now. He’s in a tight yellow suit. His cap and his glasses are gone. Ice is frozen in his beard and his hair. He’s all white like the ice, with a terrible dead look frozen on his face. He walks stiff and slow because he’s really dead.”

  “Silly!” Kip whispered. “Sil—”

  He stopped when Day went on, her voice shrill with fright.

  “Mommy, he’s coming. Coming to take me with him down under the ice. Coming faster than anything!”

  “My baby girl!” Rima swayed to rock her. “It’s just an ugly dream. Can’t you try to wake up? You’ll be okay when you do.”

  She was quiet, except for the labored wheeze, till her body jerked abruptly.

  “He got in! He’s in the ship. He’s coming up the stairs.”

  “He can’t possibly be,” Kip said. “The air lock is sealed. Nothing can get in.”

  “But he did. He came to take me. Mommy, don’t let him—”

  She screamed, a quavery shriek that rose higher and higher till something choked it off. Her body went lax. Rima rocked her a little longer, and laid her down on the berth.

  “Is she dead?” Kip asked. �
��She looks like she’s dead.”

  “No! No! She can’t be dead.” Rima bent over her to listen at her chest. “Her heart’s still beating. She’s still breathing.”

  “What happened?” Kip demanded. “Can any nightmare be like that?”

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “It frightens me.”

  Day lay limp on the berth, but Kip saw that one little fist was clenched. He pried it open and found a bright black bead.

  “The pebble.” He held it up for Rima to see. “The six-sided pebble that Carlos found on the beach, up where they’re digging the habitat. She thought it was pretty, and I gave it to her.”

  Sixteen

  Glengarth in the lead, they came out of the elevator on the comcom deck and waited in the darkness of the conference room till he turned up the holoscreens to let the starlight in. Serious and silent, they took seats at the long table, which curved against the hull. Andersen, Cruzet, and Mondragon on his right. Rima, Reba Washburn, and Jim Cheng on his left.

  They all turned to watch the elevator door.

  “Only us.” Cheng shrugged when nobody else emerged. “With a tough nut to crack.”

  He bent over a little pocket computer, slender fingers dancing over the keys, myopic eyes close to the tiny screen. Rima picked up the knitting she was learning to do, beginning with a red cap for Day. The skill should be useful here if they survived to use it. She glanced at Mondragon and felt a shock.

  He was nervously fingering a small bright pebble. She thought for a moment that it was the six-sided bead they had found in Day’s clenched hand. Relieved, she saw that it was worn round, blue and not black. A harmless bit of stone off the ancient beach.

  Earlier, when she had returned the bead to Mondragon, she had told him about Day’s dreadful dreams and begged him to get rid of it.

  “Maybe it caused the nightmares,” she had told him. “Maybe it didn’t. But it’s exactly like those odd beads Dr. Singh found on the amphibian skeleton. They’re still a riddle. Day cried to keep the thing, but I’m afraid for her to have it.”

  “I’ll turn it in to Dr. Singh,” he had said. “Tell little Day I’ll look for her panda when I’m out on the ice again.”

  They waited in the conference room till Glengarth looked at his watch.

  “Twenty minutes,” he muttered. “Stecker promised to have his people here twenty minutes ago.”

  Another twenty had passed before the elevator door slid open. Krasov and Fujiwara came out. Silently, Fujiwara bowed. A small restless man with gold-rimmed eyeglasses and a mouth full of gold teeth, he took a seat on the inside of the table’s long curve. Dropping his dark-circled eyes as if somehow abashed, he wiped his sweat-beaded forehead with a yellow silk handkerchief. Krasov followed. A big man, stolid and deliberate, he sat staring across the table at Andersen and Cruzet as if to take their measure as chess opponents. Neither man spoke.

  Jonas Roak and Stecker followed five minutes later, Wyatt Kellick behind them. Stecker muttered a response to Glengarth’s greeting and sat glaring across the table, saying nothing else. As the tension grew, Rima dropped her knitting to study them. Roak met her eyes with a smirk that made her flush. Krasov glanced sharply at her and frowned again at Glengarth. Fujiwara’s restless hand balled and squeezed the yellow handkerchief, spread it to mop his face, balled and squeezed it again.

  Stecker wore a gold-braided uniform jacket over a white jumpsuit, both of them unpressed and dirty. He needed a shave, and Rima thought he had put on weight. He sprawled back in his chair with an air of bored impatience.

  Kellick sat erect, his narrow gray eyes sweeping the starlit frost and the dead black sun behind them. Rugged and tall, his long pale hair held off his forehead with the skin of a diamondback, he might have been the Caribbean pirate in a holodrama. She thought he must have been handsome once, but his face was now a mask of scars, his nose flattened and misshapen.

  She had asked Reba Washburn for his history.

  “We’d all like to know.” Reba frowned and shook her head. “Jake Hinch sent him to us not long before we took off, with orders from Stecker to put him on ship security. No documents. He says he’s been a pugilist and a mercenary soldier. Trying to check him out, we got hints of a colorful past. At various times, he seems to have carried passports from Norway, Chile, and South Africa, under a variety of names. I think he has done prison time. He’s Stecker’s hired gun.”

  Now, staring out of the ship, he seemed indifferent to everybody.

  “Okay. Here we are.” Stecker looked around him, hiccuped, and hunched forward in his seat, scowling at Glengarth. His voice was thick, and he stopped to clear his throat. “What’s this all about?”

  “Mr. Stecker.” Glengarth straightened to face him. “We have a bone to pick. We’re out here on our own, Earth and its laws behind us forever. You should recall the covenant we all signed before takeoff.”

  “I signed nothing.”

  “Nor I.” Roak blinked and caught his breath. “I was shanghaied, remember?”

  “No matter.” Glengarth paused to survey the five men lined up against him. “Mr. Stecker, the covenant governs us now whether or not you or anybody signed it. The point now is that your status changed when we landed here.”

  Cruzet and Cheng were nodding.

  “Gerry Alt!” Andersen spoke, his voice edged with bitter emotion. “An old friend. You robbed him, Mr. Stecker. Robbed him of his ship and all he lived for. You might as well have put a bullet in his head.”

  Blinking blearily, Stecker turned to Roak as if for help that didn’t come.

  “Our feeling, sir.” Cruzet spoke with the dry-voiced precision that was almost itself an accent “But that aside, you have never appeared to be the sort of leader who might enable us to survive here. Our hard situation demands a better man.”

  “Huh—” Stecker’s grunt became another hiccup.

  “Mr. Stecker,” Glengarth resumed, his tone grimly grave. “If you don’t know the covenant, it provides for such situations as this. It allows the ship’s company to call an election to replace the chief officer. We are calling such an election now.”

  Stecker shrugged and looked again at Roak.

  “Watch yourselves!” Roak snarled. “If you recall, Mr. Stecker was director of StarSeed Mission. Under our international charter, he had full authority over all Mission operations. He was simply doing his duty when he replaced Alt for embezzlement of Mission funds—”

  “Who?” Glengarth stared at Stecker. “Who’s the embezzler?”

  Stecker flushed.

  “Mr. Stecker is still your captain.” Roak ignored the interruption. “He is not bound by your so-called covenant, and he will certainly punish any insubordination.

  “So what’s your gripe?”

  “Dr. Virili?” Nodding at Rima, Glengarth waited for her to speak.

  “Sir, I think you know.” Searchingly, she looked at Roak. “We set out from Earth to establish a colony on any habitable planet we happened to reach. This planet does seem hostile, but we have the skills and the technology to survive here. That’s our duty to our children, and to the human race.”

  “Maybe,” Roak muttered. “Or maybe that’s your own crazy dream.”

  “We’ll have problems.” She shrugged and sat straighter. “But we’ve already made a promising start. Our gripe, if you want to call it that, is the way you’ve pulled men and equipment out of the habitat to excavate a launch pit. That’s the real lunatic dream. Sheer suicide.”

  “A matter of opinion.” Roak glanced at Fujiwara, who was mopping his face again with the yellow handkerchief. “Some of us believe we have a good chance to get the ship back into quantum mode. Right, Doctor?”

  “Possibly.” Huddled in his seat, Fujiwara looked miserably uncertain. “We have inventoried available resources, but quantum computations are always difficult. Our results leave critical factors in doubt, but I believe we do have a certain possibility—”

  “Certain?” Andersen de
manded. “Did you calculate the odds?”

  “We did,” he admitted unhappily. “I hoped for better—”

  “Nyet!” Krasov burst out, almost violently. “I won’t go underground!”

  They all waited till he went on more quietly.

  “My father was a coal miner in Siberia. The dust ruined his lungs. He died in a gas explosion while I was still a child. Soon after, a union agent took us down into the mine. I was afraid to go, but the teachers wanted us to know what the mines were like. The cage dropped us into a horrid pit, a wet little cave with water dripping.

  “The power went off while we were there. Most of the group had already gone back to the top. Just a handful of us were left there in the dark. The sudden darkness was suffocating. The air had a stale stink, like something dead and rotten. The silence was terrible till somebody screamed. We waited for the cage to come back.

  “It didn’t come. The teacher wanted us to sing, but too many kids were crying. The stillness was terrible when she finally got them stopped. All I heard was the loud drip of water, like I thought it had dripped onto my father’s face. It echoed in the dark. I thought we were all going to die the way he did, with the water dripping on us.”

  He laughed uneasily.

  “Of course the lights finally did come on. The cage rattled back. We got out alive, but I’m not going underground again. Not even into that pit in the cliff where Singh found the dead monster.” He stopped to blink at Glengarth. “If you want to know, that’s why I’ve got to get out of this black hell. Dead for a billion years, unless those monsters are still alive under the ice.

  “Or underground!”

  Breathing hard, fists knotted, he turned defiantly to Rima.

  “We’ve seen no sign of that.” She nodded sympathetically. “I know you were dreadfully hurt. But you won’t have to go underground. You can stay on the ship till we can set up surface buildings—”

  “Nyet!” he shouted again. “Better die quick than slow.”

  “You will die quick,” Andersen promised him. “If you attempt quantum flight. You’d have to improvise essential wave conversion equipment we didn’t bring. You wouldn’t have adequate power. Something would certainly fail.”