Dark Horizons

by Jay Caselberg; Eric Del Carlo

For a moment, Roy’s mind was clear of everything except the child in front of him. It was the compassion in the woman’s voice. “What happened to him?”

  “Diseased, Mr. Barger. His heart was much too small at birth. We all knew this day would come, and come much too early for him. My brother is a fixisist—what your people would call a doctor. It’s his opinion that the human heart, as strong an organ as you’ll find in all the galaxy, might perhaps save the boy’s life. At the very least, it would prolong it. But now,” she gestured at the open box, “the heart we intended for the boy beats no more.”

  Roy’s fear came back with a boom. “Over twenty years as a transporter and I’ve never damaged a load. Your heart is in the same shape it would have been had I never opened the box.”

  “I assure you it is not, Mr. Barger.”

  “But I replaced the dry ice! I locked it tightly!”

  Jillie turned and locked her blue eyes with his brown ones. She laughed humorlessly. “Dry ice, Mr. Barger?”

  Roy nodded.

  “There was never ice of any sort, Mr. Barger. What was responsible for keeping the heart beating was something you would never find anywhere on this Earth. And you think this dry ice is an adequate replacement?”

  “What–”

  “It hardly matters now, Mr. Barger.”

  Though her tone had not changed, her words caused him to panic again. He might have guessed her next words had he not been too terrified to speak.

  “Oh,” and now her voice was sarcastic, “if only we had another human heart to replace this useless one that you have brought us. But where could we find a working human heart on such short notice?”

  Roy briefly heard a chuckle around the room, but he felt neither fear nor worry. Felt nothing at all, because his world went black before he had the chance.

  THE YELLOW PLANET

  ERIC BLAIR

  THIS IS SPENCER OLDHAM, second in command of the deep space research vessel Yachimata. I am the last lucid, surviving member of the crew. The others are either dead or hopelessly insane. We have been in orbit around Narcissus 4 for approximately six days. Captain Anderson, Lieutenant Tasso, Doctor Peters and Lieutenant Leone have all been murdered by Wiseman and Hendricks. Tasso’s mutilated body sits only a few feet away from me. My back is pressed against a cold steel compartment to spare myself another look at what remains of what was once a statuesque and beautiful woman. Scott is dead too. He took his own life on the surface of the planet, most likely to avoid the fate shared by the lunatics still stalking the corridors of this ship. Or maybe it was just too much, the sudden burst of overpowering insanity that took hold of them all. Maybe it simply overwhelmed him, and there was nothing else to be done.

  I don’t suppose it matters much now. The three of us will be long dead before any help arrives, before Europa Station even receives word of our distress. I have ejected the core, only battery power remains and quickly dwindles. It was necessary, if only to ensure my survival long enough to make this recording and warn anyone who approaches. The surface of the planet must be avoided at all cost. Make no attempt to reach Narcissus 4. Only death and insanity await any foolish enough to go there. Turn your ship around. Do it now. Spare yourself the horrors we have endured. The planet has strange and far reaching powers. Even I am not immune. Even from orbit I feel its pull and the twinges of insanity it can place inside even the strongest and most stable of us.

  Wiseman was a good man. Two days ago, he was an intelligent, decent man; a family man. Two hours ago he tortured the captain to death, strapped him down and slowly went to work on him. I was spared the details. The captain managed to bestow that small gift to me. It was only his bravery and eternal calm that saved my life. And I did nothing for him. I saw him there, tied down at the mercy of a maniac. There was nothing I could do to save him. Or maybe I could have. But I didn’t. I ran. I ran and I survived. Now I sit here, jabbering into a voice recorder, feeling the air grow thin around me. I weigh half what I did only hours ago. The artificial gravity is going out. Air reclamation is slowing, and it is cold in here, so bitterly cold. Hypoxia or hypothermia, one will kill me if not the other. The door is ruined, the controls smashed from inside. Another paltry reason why I am still here, breathing increasingly toxic air, rambling while I listen to mad screams and fits of laughter echoing through the halls of this ship.

  I met his wife before we left. Wiseman, I mean. George. His name is George, and hers, Sophia. I cannot remember the names of their daughters, and I cannot stop seeing the image of his small, studious hands madly stabbing at Dr. Peters as he and Hendricks murdered him.

  And I must tell you that tale. I must convince you, if any small positive is to come from this repulsive chain of events. I will not start at the beginning. I don’t know, even now, when that really was. Did the planet call out to us, somehow? Did it drag its prey across oceans of empty space, pulling us through the void to feed upon the supple minds of three men who were once our friends? We could have chosen a hundred stars for our fifth attempt at extrasolar exploration. We chose this one. Every life on this ship was forfeited in that single, solitary instant. I know that now, sitting here on this cold metal floor. When they send others, investigators rather than explorers, to find out what happened to us, will their lives be beyond saving as well?

  As you listen to this recording, will you hear and heed my warning? Or will the call of the planet be too much? Is it, even now, too powerful to be denied? I’ll never know. But I pray, the prayer of an atheist that for only a few hours has known with all certainty that hell is real, I pray that you will not suffer the horrors I have suffered. I pray that, by some miracle of unknown grace, this terror will stop with the last breath that leaves my body. I pray, but I do not truly believe.

  There is no beginning, none knowable to me. It began eons ago when whatever occupies Narcissus 4 began its ghastly work. Perhaps it was once a habited planet, a place whose denizens slaughtered one another as Wisemen and Hendricks slaughtered the rest of the crew. Those details are most likely lost to the vastness of space and deep time. But I must begin somewhere. Even now, as I record the horrible details of the past two days, I cannot help but feel the fear rising up the back of my spine. It speaks to me in the strange, enigmatic tones of a madman. It is fear, but also a beckoning. Something wants me on the surface of that planet. It is not a voice precisely, perhaps not even something possessing a will as you and I possess. But it calls to me. I can feel it calling just as it did on that dreaded day in orbit. Perhaps I felt it as far back as the deceleration of the ship, the gradual slowing that triggered our release from the hibernation chambers that brought us here.

  To define that beginning still defies reason. But I felt that dread as I brought the ship into orbit. It was easy enough to dismiss, a nagging pull that was simple to confuse with the weight of the nerves brought on by any venture as complex and dangerous as ours. I know I felt it two days ago, watching the shuttle detach from us and slowly descend to the surface of the planet. I heard it in Leone’s voice, an edge of finicky, nervous energy that permeated every word he spoke. I had heard it minutes before, Tasso’s voice trembling as she reported from engineering that all systems were operating in normal parameters.

  Only Anderson, our unflappable commander, showed no sign of the lunacy that was only starting to surround and suffocate our mission. He spoke, clearly and calmly, through the ship’s communications array to the shuttle:

  “Status report, Leone.” All the time I had known him he’d spoken in this manner. Reserved and circumspect almost to a fault, he spoke to you directly and expected you to return his precise rationality at all times.

  “The shuttle is entering the atmosphere, Captain.” You could hear the edge in his voice, that same tight tremble still betraying the gravity of the mistake we were all making. “Everything is five by five. Outer hull temperature is within normal limits. I’ve got a clear picture of the landing zone ahead. We are moving toward it at eight hundred kilometers per
hour and slowing.”

  The captain switched abruptly from the outer communications array to ship’s intercom. “Tasso, how are we looking?” Perhaps this displayed some bit of apprehension on his part. Such things will sneak their way in. They find the cracks and worm their way into your mind, poisoning everything, especially in places like this. Always in places like this.

  “Fine, Captain,” she almost squeaked. If I noticed anything strange about a woman almost two meters tall speaking in such a tiny voice, it didn’t register. Forcing things not to register was becoming a disturbing habit. Anderson quickly switched back to communicating with the shuttle.

  “I want constant status reports, Leone. Tell us how you’re doing.” No reply was received, not even static filtering across the many kilometers now separating us. “Leone.” He repeated. “Leone, come back.” There was no response. He turned to me. “Oldham, try the comm from your station.”

  I flicked a switch and spoke into my headset: “Leone, this is Oldham. How you guys doing down there?” There was no betraying the tension now. This was not supposed to happen. “Leone?” I said again, questioning now. “Shuttle, this is Yachimata. Come in. Leone, come in goddammit.”

  “Calm down,” the captain said. “It’s probably just some sort of unexpected interference. No way of knowing what we might encounter out here.” He clicked back to the intercom. “Tasso, we’ve lost contact with the shuttle. I want a complete diagnostic of external communications. Make it fast. I want contact restored as soon as possible.”

  For a moment, there was no response. A darkness passed over me then, a blackening shade clouding my mind over and leaving me on the brink of terror. But the moment passed, and before the captain could even repeat himself, Tasso replied in that same diminutive whisper.

  “I’m already working on it, Captain. It’ll take a few minutes, but if the problem is on our end, I’ll find it.”

  And then there was silence. No one spoke for several minutes. I just sat there, frightened and not wanting to show any signs of cowardice in front of a man that seemed the perfect model of confidence and composure. We had no way of knowing what was happening with the shuttle. We already knew that the planet’s ionosphere refracted enough wavelengths to prevent radar from following their progress. All we could do was wait. Standard procedure would have been for Leone to assume mission command and continue to the surface. It was not unheard of for weather patterns to emerge that could cause the connection to cut out intermittently. It was still possible nothing was wrong. But it didn’t feel that way.

  For over an hour, nothing happened. And then, just as suddenly as communications had cut out, the ship appeared again on our displays. We tried to raise them again, but only got a strange, garbled mass of sounds over our headsets. For a second, it sounded like there were voices coming out of the strange milieu of background sounds, but it was impossible to make anything out conclusively. The shuttle slowed as it approached, following the proper procedure except for its total lack of communication.

  “Oldham, I want you to get down to the shuttle bay. I’ll take the comm Report in on the state of the shuttle crew as soon as possible. I’ll have the doctor meet you there.” He stopped, as if taking a slow stock of the words that had just come out of his mouth, then continued, softly: “I want to know what the hell is going on here.”

  I left, moving quickly toward the shuttle bay. I arrived just as the hatch opened. Leone burst through, his chest heaving as he took long, awkward steps into the ship.

  “He’s dead. They’re all dead …” His words faltered as he dropped like a dead weight to the floor. The doctor dropped to his side, desperately searching his face for some sign of how to proceed. I looked behind him. Hendricks and Wiseman sat there, still strapped into their inward facing seats, seemingly unharmed. They stared deeply across the center of the shuttle, looking with defined intention at some point far beyond the walls of the shuttle.

  Leone babbled on, mumbling incoherently and failing to lock onto Doctor Peter’s searching eyes. He was getting back to his feet though, aided by the doctor’s long, thin arms. I stood there in something like shock, listening to him babble and wondering, with trepidation, where the hell the third member of the landing party was. Scott, the exobiologist, was missing from the shuttle. A million questions rose in my mind, forming a chaotic mass of noise in my head. I felt confused, lightheaded. I was unsure of how to proceed or what to ask, or if my questions would have any impact upon the raving Leone at all. But I had to ask. I had to force myself to some state resembling coherence and do my job. I stepped forward, almost against my will, and addressed Leone.

  “Where is Scott?” I barked at him. The man at first did not reply, only continued mumbling some inane gibberish. I took another step forward, until I was only inches from the man’s face. I stared into those wild, roving eyes. For just an instant, I thought I saw the strange yellow of the planet in them. But then it was gone and I forced myself to continue. Lifting a single finger to his chin and pushing his roving eyes toward mine, I repeated myself. “Lieutenant Leone, get a grip on yourself and tell us what has happened to Scott. Is he still on the planet’s surface? What the hell is wrong with Hendricks and Wiseman? Why the hell are they just sitting there?”

  Still, he did not seem to even notice that I was there. I thought for a second I might have to slap his face. But before I could, the man’s fit seemed to recede on its own. He ceased his disquieting mumbling and looked at us, the doctor first; finally at myself. He made eye contact, and seeming a little more himself, addressed me directly.

  “Sir, the planet, Sir, we have to leave immediately. Don’t go down there, whatever you do, stay the fuck away from that place. There were things down there, they spoke to me, they …”

  His eyes widened as he approached the end of this disjointed statement, and he seemed again in danger of wandering off into another meaningless string of nonsense.

  “Leone. Leone, look at me,” I repeated. He seemed again to focus, to push back against the tide of madness welling within him. His eyes narrowed just enough for me to think I could perhaps continue and get something resembling a rational response. “What happened to Scott? Where is he?”

  “Dead.” The color receded from his face, turning it a pasty, milky white. “He pulled his helmet off. I saw him. They were walking out onto the surface. I told them not to, begged them all, but they went on anyway, in some kind of trance. They went out there, and he turned, as if he was looking off at something on the horizon. Then he disconnected his helmet and just pulled it off.” Again staring past me into space, he continued his monologue, dropping off into a dissociated monotone. “He was dead in less than a minute; suffocated.”

  I looked back over his shoulder, glancing at the staring bodies behind him. I was at a loss on how to continue, the questions drying up inside me as I looked at the two of them. The doctor, mercifully, stepped in.

  “The other members of the crew, what is their status?” he asked in the dry, detached tone of an emergency room doctor staring at the day’s twentieth doomed victim of some horrible catastrophe. Leone looked to him, his mouth slowly dropping open. He searched for the words, shaking his head slightly. Finally, he responded:

  “Nothing. They haven’t said a word. I couldn’t raise them on the comm I only got this strange soup of static and background noise. Sometimes, it seemed there were voices, terrible things choking and screaming behind the static, but nothing from the landing party. They didn’t even respond to the intercom before they left. I could see them come around the side of the ship, that’s when Scott … They never said a word.” He began nodding feverishly, as if this were the most important thing he had said in all of his odd, disjointed ramblings. “They never said a single word. I only had the instruments saying we had two live bodies back on board, and I got us the hell out of there.” Stopping here, he looked back over his shoulder at them with a sense of terrible foreboding.

  Perhaps I am only forcing my own
dejected and weary perspective upon him. Maybe there was nothing behind that look, only an exhausted sense of pride that he had managed to get anyone back to the ship alive. But in that moment I think he knew what he had brought back with him. He could not account for it, could not qualify the horrible knowledge blooming within him. But he knew, just the same.

  “I got them back to the ship. I got them the hell out of there, and I brought them back to the ship.” He fell into a deep, all-encompassing silence. He never lived to leave it. I went to report to the captain, leaving the doctor to deal with the three of them.

  Hours later, the command staff gathered for a meeting on the bridge. Leone, Wiseman, and Hendricks were all in medbay. The captain, myself, Tasso and Peters stood in the low lighting of the bridge. The windows to the fore pointed steadily at the gigantic curvature of the great yellow planet below. Everyone was tired, strung out from hours on duty and the lingering effects of the hibernation. To say we were disturbed by recent events would be a ridiculous understatement. The state of the returning landing party, not to mention the death of Scott, put everyone on edge. But even more than this, there was a persistent nagging edge to the situation that no one could quite qualify. Again I hate to let my traumatized state impose itself upon the horrid events I have endured, but it seemed everyone was looking to the planet. They let their eyes repeatedly wander unconsciously down to its unassuming but strangely hypnotic presence.

  The captain ran the session strictly. He went from one of us to the other, getting our report and moving on as if the situation were not moving past the realm of all plausibility. He did not wander into speculation or dismay, and had no tolerance for anyone else who did.

  “Doctor, how are our people?” he asked, still with that almost mockingly even tone.

  “Well, Leone is showing classic signs of shock.” With the dry, clinical tone so stereotypical of his profession, the aged doctor continued. “His pulse and respiration are rapid, he has trouble concentrating. His skin is cold and clammy to the touch. And, of course, he is highly agitated, as can be attested to by Commander Oldham.” He gave me a slight nod, as if gesturing to a piece of physical evidence that obviously supported his argument.