The Space Opera Novella

by Frank Belknap Long

  I heard Pete suck in his breath. I couldn’t seem to draw a deep breath. There was a physical quality of eeriness in the sight which took me by the throat.

  The figure was wearing a light spacesuit, vacuum-sealed at the neck. A transparent headpiece bulged out above the flexible garment, a great glistening globe encasing the head of the most beautiful woman I’d ever Her hair was piled in a tumbled mass of gold on her head and there was a delicate flush on her skin, visible through the glowing sphere. She was staring at me without seeming to see me, her cheeks shadowed by long, convex lashes.

  Some women mature into loveliness; others have it thrust upon them. I didn’t tell myself that straight off. I was too stunned to make up pretty speeches. But later I realized that her hair, eyes, and complexion were as near perfect as they could be without looking artificial.

  Her suit was cumbersome, and it weighed her down. But there was something weird, spine-chilling about the way she moved. She walked with a smooth flow of motion, almost as if she were skating across the deck.

  I was a little afraid of what Pete might do. He was shaking with excitement, and I could see that he was keyed up to a dangerous pitch. Doubting his own sanity and mine to boot!

  But I wasn’t going to be stampeded into fear! I’d been under a tremendous strain, sure. But I knew a flesh-and-blood woman when I saw one! The girl was real! The pulse beating in her forehead was real and so were her eyes and hair! We hadn’t made even a cursory search of the ship. There were plenty of dark little corners where she could have concealed herself.

  Suddenly I saw that she’d glided past Pete and was facing away from us, her hands extended toward the control board. A little to the left of the board there was a dull flickering on the bulkhead.

  For an instant I mistook the weird glimmer for a shadow cast by her swaying shoulders. I thought she was just reaching for the board to steady herself.

  Then I saw her hands moving on the board and knew that a gravity panel was swinging open on the void! I leapt toward her with a warning cry.

  If she heard me she gave no sign. You can hear a shout through a thin helmet, but she didn’t even turn. She just darted sideways and then forward—straight through the panel into the utter black emptiness of space! A flash of light—and she was gone!

  The panel closed so soundlessly you could have heard a pin drop.

  I had trouble with my breath again. For an instant my throat had an iron brace around it. Then I remembered that she hadn’t gone out unprotected into the void. Her suit would keep the cold out, and the magnetic suction disks on her wrists and knees would enable her to cling to the hull, to crawl along it. But if she’d gone out to do a repair job on the hull, she had the kind of courage you read about in the Admiralty Reports.

  If I had it, it was glazed over with a thick coating of ice. I stood braced against the bulkhead, the old Adam in me chanting a hymn to life, a hymn to the Sun, and feeling glad I wasn’t in her shoes.

  What a way for a guy to feel!

  Then something happened to me; I saw her face again, deep in my mind, and it seemed to be pleading with me. It wasn’t just a pleading. There was music and wonder in it!

  I could hear the pound of surf on a golden beach, and the sun was warming the sea and the air, and she was in my arms and I was kissing her.

  Then it was night and the palms were bending lower over us, and the moonlight was so bright I could hardly see the web of radiance around her head. But I could hear the rise and fall of paddles,, and someone singing far off over the water. We were running down the beach toward the pounding surf. Water was glistening on her tanned arms and I could hear her laughter.

  Pete had leapt to his feet. He was staring at me, sweat standing out on his forehead in great, shining beads.

  “What did I tell you, son?” he groaned. “A sickness of the mind—”

  His voice thickened, broke.

  The terror in his stare made me realize how close to the brink I was. His refusal to believe the evidence of his eyes was ah attempt at rationalization, but it wasn’t a good attempt.

  He was assuming the worst, taking his own madness for granted.

  I grabbed him by both shoulders. “You’re as sane as I am!” I yelled, shaking him. “That girl was here when we took over! A stowaway! What’s so crazy about that?”

  Pete’s throat moved as he swallowed. “Let go of me, Jim! Believe what you want! I’m going crazy—and tryin’ to explain it won’t stop it!”

  “Common sense will stop it! Did you notice that vacuum suit she was wearing? It’s as ancient as the ship! It must have come out of the ship’s locker!”

  Pete stared at me until I lost my head. “She’s out on the hull alone! You hear? Alone, in a suit that won’t give her much protection! If her irons slip she’ll be done for! She’s either stark staring mad or—”

  My thoughts came so fast I had to stop. But my mind raced on. Was she actually mad? Or had she crawled out of hiding to find herself in a ship that was fast becoming a droning death trap?

  A woman hiding in the dark, with her senses abnormally alert, would be quick to get the awful feel of a ship about to fly asunder. She wouldn’t have to guess. She’d know!

  A girl pilot? Well, why not? There were plenty of girl pilots working their fingers to the bone to earn passage money in Callisto City. Stowing away would be a short cut to freedom and the green hills of Earth. You couldn’t blame a girl for hating the dust and roar of an atomic power plant, or the drudgery of a mining job.

  I could picture her succumbing to blind panic, ripping a suit down from the locker, and crawling out into the void to tighten the gravity bolts on the naked hull with a magneto-wrench.

  “Jeebies always try to kill themselves!” Pete croaked. “You get to pitying them! Your head swells and you get all choked up with pity! And that’s when you know you’ve blown your top!”

  I answered that with a voice that rang hard. “All right, have it your own way! She’s a jeebie! But I’m not going to stand here pitying her! I’m going to help her!”

  I never quite knew how I reached the locker, with imaginary eyes glittering at me from every corner of the ship. Pete’s wild talk hadn’t really shaken me. All loose talk about the mind is dangerous, of course. But I wasn’t scared of anything I couldn’t see.

  The idea of a haunted ship seemed silly to me. Almost laughable. But I had to admit the ship had the feel of occupancy about it. I half expected that a second helmeted figure would pop out of the shadows before I could go to the aid of the first.

  My palms were sweating as I struggled into a spacesuit that hadn’t been occupied for at least a century. There were five suits hanging in the locker, and I picked the biggest one. It was a little too small for me, but I couldn’t complain much on that score. It kinked a little, then drew tight over the shoulders, but nothing ripped when I moved.

  I must have looked grotesque in that old, stiff, freakish garment, all bulges and creases. A big flaring dome over my head, feet like metal pancakes clattering on the deck.

  But I wasn’t concerned with my appearance, just my oxygen intake.

  Back by the gravity panel, Pete tried desperately to stop me. His bony hands went out, plucked at my wrists. I couldn’t hear him babbling outside the helmet. But I could see his shining eyes and moving lips. His eyes were tortured, pleading.

  He might as well have been pleading with a man a hundred miles away—or a century dead!

  I was deaf to reason. I was feeling merely a blind instinct to help a woman who had taken on a man’s job.

  Pete’s eyes followed me as I went clumping toward the control board, and I felt a sudden tug of pity for him. If I never came back, he’d miss me a lot. Good old Pete! To make him feel better I flashed him a smile and waved him back.

  “Sit down and relax, old-timer!” I said. “I’m just going out for a little bre
ath of fresh air!”

  It was just as well he couldn’t hear me. He was real touchy about space. You had to treat it with respect. The lads who sailed the seas of Terra before Pete started reaching for the stars with his little pink hands had what it takes, and their lingo is the spaceman’s lingo still. But to Pete spacemen were a notch higher in every respect. Nothing riled him more than loose talk about reading the weather by the glass or taking a squint at the North Star, or going out for a breather on deck!

  I thought of all that as I went out. Oh, Pete was a special character if ever there was one.

  CHAPTER III

  The Mirage Pup

  I crawled out into the void, on my hands and knees, clinging to the rough hull, digging with my magnetic irons into the thick coating of meteoric dust and grit and rubble the ship had picked up in deep space.

  Brother, it’s all yours if you want it! A wind that isn’t a wind tearing at you; the stars blazing in a black pit, and a million light years staring you in the face, doing your thinking for you, warning you that forever is too long a time to go somersaulting through space shrouded in a blanket of ice.

  You feel your grip slipping, know it can’t slip, and dig, dig with your knees. You look up and there’s the flame of a rocket jet missing you by inches. You look down and there’s nothing to maim or sear you—just utter blackness. Believe me, that’s worse!

  I stared straight across the hull through a spiraling splotch of blue flame toward the stern rocket jets. The flame whorl came from diffuse matter friction. Tiny particles hit the ship, bounced off and set up an electrical discharge in the ether.

  It’s cool and it doesn’t burn. If you keep your head you can crawl right through it.

  I started crawling the instant I saw her. She was clinging to the hull between two flaring rocket jets, her magneto-wrench rising and falling in the unearthly glare.

  A swaying figure wrapped in blue light, her face looking pinched and white and faraway through the globe on her shoulders. The helmet itself looked small against the vast backdrop of space. But as I crawled toward her it kept getting larger—like an expanding soap bubble. I had the crazy feeling that there was a big crowd down below, waiting to jeer or cheer!

  I threw the illusion off and let my irons carry me back and forth in a crazy kind of jig. The magnetics had to be guided by my muscles and my will. It was twist and turn, go limp and brace hard, relax and edge forward.

  Suddenly the ship lurched, giving off a blinding flare. I knew it was just a stress we’d hit—one of those little pockets in space where the diffuse matter of the void is sucked dry by energies that don’t show up on the instruments.

  Ships pass through stresses fast. But when the flare vanished I was dangling head downwards from the hull, my right knee attached to solid metal, the rest of me hugging empty space.

  Furiously I slammed my left knee upward, twisted my body forward, and got a firm grip on the hull again with my wrist irons. It was a contortionist feat which brought the blood rushing to my ears. When my head stopped spinning I was staring into the face of the girl I’d risked my neck to save in an inferno of ice and flame.

  We were so close our helmets almost touched. But she wasn’t looking at me. Six feet from my swaying knees she was making frantic gestures with her magnetowrench, her face a twisting mask of horror. Her body was twisting too and she seemed to be fighting off something I couldn’t see!

  Frantic with alarm, I strained forward and threw my right arm about her.

  At least, I thought I did! But my iron-weighted wrist seemed to pass right through her! It whipped through emptiness to strike the hull with an impact that sent a stab of pain darting up my arm to my shoulder. The pain was agonizing for an instant; then it fell away.

  At the same instant I saw the light. It was faint at first, a pale spectral glow that haloed her helmet and lapped in concentric waves about her knees. It wasn’t a flame whorl. It gave off iridescent glints and grew swiftly brighter, turning from pale blue to dazzling azure. Then it became a weaving funnel of light that spurted from the hull with a low humming sound.

  The humming was unearthly. It penetrated my helmet and became a shrill inward keening with a quality hard to define. Imagine a butterfly of sound struggling fiercely to escape from a sonic chrysalis. It was a little like that, a kind of shrill fluttering on the tonal plane.

  The light did not remain attached to the hull. It shot up into the void and became a vertical shaft of downsweeping radiance. From its summit pulsing ripples ascended, giving it the aspect of a waterfall. Then it became, a prism, flashing with all the colors of the spectrum.

  A man may awaken from a nightmare, stare for an instant into the darkness and try to rationalize his fears. But this was no nightmare! As I stared up the iridescence was replaced by a leaf-screen effect shot through with crimson filaments. Shadows appeared amidst the ripples, straight and jagged lines of some tenuous substance that seemed to mold itself into a pattern.

  It may have been imagination. But for the barest instant as I stared at the incredible shape of radiance a face seemed to look out at me. A fat face, bloated, toad-like, supported by a shadowy neck that swelled out beneath it like the hood of a rearing cobra!

  Suddenly my scalp crawled and my helmet seemed to contract, pressing against my skull with a deadly firmness. An electrolube!

  I knew instinctively that the flame shape was an electrolube—a devouring entity of the void which snaked through deep space close to Saturn’s orbit, a whiplash shape of pure force with a hellish affinity for life, its negative charge seeking a positive charge with which to unite!

  It was itself alive, the ultimate life form, sentient and polarized, an energy eater that, sucked nourishment from electrical impulses.

  And there was just enough positive electricity in the human body to give the horror the power to destroy by slashing down in swift, flesh-destroying stabs that could cut through a spacesuit like a knife through jelly!

  Flesh and blood had no chance against it.

  For one awful instant I looked straight into the eyes of a girl I couldn’t save, an instant as long as a lifetime to the poor fool who loved her! No, I’m not raving! Do you think I’d have crawled out into the everlasting night of space if I hadn’t known there could be no other woman for me?

  She didn’t wait for the horror to slice down. She jerked her knees, tore her wrists free and shut her eyes. Then she was gone. She didn’t even move her lips to say good-by. Space was her bridegroom. It took her and she was gone.

  I looked away. Not caring how soon death came, knowing I’d be with her if I just stayed with the ship.

  I waited for the anguish to hit me. I waited for a full minute. Two. I shut my eyes as she had done.

  When I opened them the electrolube had vanished. And when I looked down, the void had grown brighter. Gone was the great ringed disk of Saturn.

  Just little frosty stars glittered far-off, mocking. And another planet that was mottled pink and yellow. A ringless planet, swimming in a-murky haze, with eleven little moons spinning around it—eight on one side, three on the other. One of the moons was red.

  Jupiter is bigger than Saturn, bigger than a thousand Earths. And I was moving away from it on a droning ship’s hull, a tiny fleck of matter of no importance in that awful sweep of space. But when I dragged myself back through the gravity panel into the ship my brain was bursting with a despair so vast it seemed to dwarf the vastness of space. Pete was standing just inside the panel, holding something furry and black in his arms that squirmed in the cold light. When he saw me he uttered a smothered oath.

  I tugged at my helmet, got it off.

  “Jim, lad, I was afraid you was a goner!” Pete choked. “You went chasing mirages on the hull. Mirages, Jim!”

  My jaw dropped. I stood-stock still, staring at him, unable to believe my eyes.

  “It’s al
l my fault!” Pete groaned. “Me and my rantings! Jeebies my foot! Soon as you went out I got to thinkin’. There’s a beastie could do it, a little black, furry beastie called a mirage pup!

  “Sired on Pluto, breedin’ on Pluto in the dark an’ the cold! Squattin’ on its haunches, projectin’ thoughts! Makin’ ’em look solid and real! Sounds too, though you don’t hear the sounds with your ears!

  “His memories, Jim! Things he’s seen himself, long, long ago! We been makin’ pets of ’em so long we take ’em for granted. All the old skippers had ’em on their ships.”

  “Oh, Eternity!” I choked.

  “They can make thoughts look as solid as a cake of ice, Jim! Three-dimensional, like! I figured it this way. There was a girl, about a hundred years ago, took a ship—this ship—out to Saturn! And somethin’ happened to the ship. So she went out to fix what was wrong and maybe never came back. Her gravity irons could have slipped—”

  “No,” I said quickly. “She let go deliberately because—it was better that way!”

  I was staring at the little beast Take a rabbit, puff it out, paint it black, and give it two huge, spectral, tarsier-like eyes! Give it a purple snout, devilishly long claws. Breed it with a full-blooded Scotch Terrier and you’ll get—a Plutonian mirage pup!

  The little beast whined, then yapped and wagged its tail at me. Its ear stood straight up. It nuzzled Pete’s palm.

  Mirage pups could coat everything over with evanescent images that looked real. They could change the outside as well as the inside of a ship. They could put Saturn beyond the viewpane, instead of Jupiter. Put a girl in the ship who lived once, engrave an image of that girl on your heart so that getting it off would mean a tearing anguish.

  Yes, a mirage pup could do that because it would have a long memory. Mirage pups lived to a ripe old age. Slowed metabolism. The cold and dark of Pluto. Long periods of hibernation on that frigid planet while they dreamed the long, long dreams of their youth. And projected those dreams on awakening. Dreams, memories, buried loyalties.