A. E. Van Vogt - Novel 18 - Mission to the Stars

by Mission to the Stars

  His hope was delay. They had ten minutes in which they could save themselves. He must waste every second of that time, resist all their efforts, try to control the situation. If only his special, three-dimensional hypnotism worked through communicators—

  It didn’t. Lines of light leaped at him from the wall and crisscrossed his body, held him in his chair like so many unbreakable cables. Even as he was bound hand and foot by the palpable energy, a second complex of forces built up before his face, barred his thought pressure from the grand captain, and finally coned over his head like a dunce cap.

  He was caught as neatly as if a dozen men had swarmed with their strength and weight over his body. Maltby relaxed and laughed. “Too late,” he taunted. “It’ll take at least an hour for this ship to reduce to a safe speed; and at this velocity you can’t turn aside in time to avoid the greatest storm in this part of the universe.” That wasn’t strictly true. There was still time and room to sheer off before the advancing storm in any of the fronting directions. The impossibility was to turn toward the storm’s tail, or its great bulging sides.

  His thought was interrupted by the first cry from the young woman; a piercing cry; “Central engines! Reduce speed! Emergency!”

  There was a jar that shook the walls and a pressure that tore at his muscles. Maltby adjusted and then stared across the table at the grand captain. She was smiling, a frozen mask of a smile, and she said from between clenched teeth: “Lieutenant Neslor, use any means physical or otherwise, but make him talk. There must be something.”

  “His second mind is the key,” the psychologist’s voice came. “It’s not Dellian. It has only normal resistance. I shall subject it to the greatest concentration of conditioning ever focused on a human brain, using the two basics: sex and logic. I shall have to use you, noble lady, as the object of his affections.”

  “Hurry!” said the young woman. Her voice was like a metal bar.

  Maltby sat in a mist, mental and physical. Deep in his mind was awareness that he was an entity, and that irresistible machines were striving to mold his thought. He resisted. The resistance was as strong as his life, as intense as all the billions and quadrillions of impulses that had shaped his being, could make it.

  But the outside thought, the pressure, grew stronger. How silly of him to resist Earth—when this lovely woman of Earth loved him, loved him, loved him. Glorious was that civilization of Earth and the main galaxy. Three hundred million billion people. The very first contact would rejuvenate the Fifty Suns. How lovely she is; I must save her. She means everything to me.

  As from a great distance, he began to hear his own voice, explaining what must be done, just how the ship must be turned, in what direction, how much time there was. He tried to stop himself, but inexorably his voice went on, mouthing the words that spelled a second defeat! for the Fifty Suns.

  The mist began to fade. The terrible pressure eased from his straining mind. The damning stream of words ceased to pour from his lips. He sat up shakily, conscious that the energy cords and the energy cap had been withdrawn from his body. He heard the grand captain say into a communicator:

  “By making a point 0100 turn we shall miss the storm by seven light weeks. I admit it is an appallingly sharp curve, but I feel that we should have at least that much leeway.”

  She turned and stared at Maltby: “Prepare yourself. At half a light year a minute even a hundredth of a degree turn makes some people black out.”

  “Not me,” said Maltby, and tensed his Dellian muscles. She fainted three times during the next four minutes as he sat there watching her. But each time she recovered within seconds. “We human beings,” she said wanly, “are a poor lot. But at least we know how to endure.” The terrible minutes dragged. And dragged. Maltby began to feel the strain of that infinitesimal turn. He thought at last: How could these people ever hope to survive a direct hit on a storm?

  Abruptly it was over; a man’s voice said quietly:

  “We have followed the prescribed course, noble lady, and are now out of dang—”

  He broke off with a shout: “Captain, the light of a Nova sun has just flashed from the direction of the storm! ”

  Chapter

  Twelve

  IN THOSE minutes before disaster struck, the battleship Star Cluster glowed like an immense and brilliant jewel. The warning glare from the Nova set off an incredible roar of emergency clamor through all of her hundred and twenty decks. From end to end her lights flicked on. They burned row by row straight across her four thousand feet of length with the hard twinkle of cut gems. In the reflection of that light, the black mountain that was her hull looked like the fabulous planet of Cassidor, her destination, as seen at night from a far darkness, sown with diamond shining cities.

  Silent as a ghost, grand and wonderful beyond all imagination, glorious in her power, the great ship slid through the blackness along the special river of time and space which was her plotted course.

  Even as she rode into the storm there was nothing visible. The space ahead looked as clear as any vacuum. So tenuous were the gases that made up the storm that the ship would not even have been aware of them if it had been traveling at atomic speeds. Violent the disintegration of matter in that storm might be, and the sole source of cosmic rays the hardest energy in the known universe. But the immense, the cataclysmic danger to the Star Cluster was a direct result of her own terrible velocity.

  Striking that mass of gas at half a light year a minute was like running into an unending solid wall. The great ship shuddered in every plate as the deceleration tore at her gigantic strength. In seconds she had run the gamut of all the recoil systems her designers had planned for her as a unit.

  She began to break up.

  And still everything was according to the original purpose of the superb engineering firm that had built her. The limit of unit strain reached, she dissolved into her nine thousand separate sections.

  Streamlined needles of metal were those sections, four hundred feet long, forty feet wide; silver-like shapes sinuated cunningly through the gases, letting the pressure of them slide off their smooth sides. But it wasn’t enough. Metal groaned from the torture of deceleration. In the deceleration chambers, men and women lay at the bare edge of consciousness, enduring agony that seemed beyond endurance. Hundreds of sections careened through space avoiding each other by means of automatic screens.

  And still, in spite of the hideously maintained velocity, that mass of gases was not bridged; light years of thickness still had to be covered.

  Once more all the limits of human strength was reached. The final action was chemical, directly on the thirty thousand human bodies—those bodies for whose sole benefit all the marvelous safety devices had been conceived and constructed, the poor, fragile, human beings who through all the ages had persisted in dying under normal conditions from a pressure of something less than fifteen gravities.

  The prompt reaction of the automatics in rolling back every floor, and plunging every person into the deceleration chambers of each section—that saving reaction was abruptly augmented as the deceleration chamber was flooded by a special type of gas.

  Wet was that gas, and clinging. It settled thickly on the clothes of the humans, soaked through to the skin and through the skin, into every part of the body.

  Sleep came gently, and with it a wonderful relaxation. The blood grew immune to shock; muscles that, a minute before, had been drawn with anguish—loosened; the brain impregnated with life-giving chemicals that relieved it of all shortages remained untroubled even by dreams. Everyone grew enormously flexible to gravitation pressures—a hundred—a hundred and fifty gravities of deceleration; and still the life force clung.

  The great heart of the Universe beat on. The storm roared along its inescapable artery, creating the radiance of life, purging the dark of its poisons—and at last the tiny ships in their separate courses burst its great bounds.

  They began to come together, to seek each other, as if among
them there was an irresistible passion that demanded intimacy of union. Automatically they slid into their old positions; the battleship Star Cluster began again to take form—but there were gaps. Segments were lost.

  On the third day, Acting Grand Captain Rutgers called the surviving captains to the forward bridge, where he was temporarily making his headquarters. After the conference a communique was issued to the crew:

  At 008 hours this morning a message was received from Grand Captain, the Right Honorable Gloria Cecily, the Lady Laurr of Noble Laurr, I.C., C.M., G.K.R. She has been forced down on a planet of a yellow-white sun. Her ship crashed on landing, and is unrepairable. As all communication with her has been by non-directional subspace radio, and as it will be utterly impossible to locate such an ordinary type sun among so many millions of other suns, the Captains in session regret to report that our noble lady’s name must now be added to that longest of all lists of naval casualties: the list of those who have been lost forever on active duty.

  The admiralty lights will bum blue until further notice.

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  HER back was to him as he approached. Maltby hesitated, then tensed his mind, and held her there beside the section of the ship that had been the main bridge of the Star Cluster.

  The long metal shape lay half buried in the marshy ground of the great valley, its lower end jutting down into the shimmering, deep, yellowish black waters of the sluggish river. He paused a few feet from the tall, slim woman, and, still holding her unaware of him, examined once again the environment that was to be their life. The fine spray of dark rain that had dogged his exploration walk was retreating over the yellow rim of valley to the “west.” As he watched, a small yellow sun burst out from behind a curtain of dark, ocherous clouds and glared at him brilliantly. Below was an expanse of jungle that glinted strangely brown and yellow. Everywhere was that dark-brown and intense, almost liquid yellow.

  Maltby sighed—and turned his attention to the woman, willed her not to see him as he walked around in front of her. He had given a great deal of thought to the Right Honorable Gloria Cecily during his walk. Basically, of course, the problem of a man and a woman who were destined to live the rest of their lives together, alone on a remote planet, was very simple. Particularly in view of the fact that one of the two had been conditioned to be in love with the other. He smiled grimly. He could appreciate the artificial origin of that love, but that didn’t dispose of the profound fact of it.

  The conditioning machine had struck to his very core. Unfortunately, it had not touched her at all; and two days of being alone with her had brought out one reality: The Lady Laurr of Noble Laurr was not even remotely thinking of yielding herself to the normal requirements of the situation. It was time that she was made aware, not because an early solution was necessary, or even desirable, but because she had to realize that the problem existed. He stepped forward and took her in his arms.

  She was a tall graceful woman; she fitted into his embrace as if she belonged there; and, because his control of her made her return the kiss, its warmth had an effect beyond his intention. He had intended to free her mind in the middle of the kiss.

  He didn’t.

  When he finally released her, it was only a physical release. Her mind was still completely under his domination. There was a metal chair that had been set just outside one of the doors. He walked over, sank into it and stared up at the grand captain. He felt shaken. The flame of desire that had leaped through him was a telling tribute to the conditioning he had undergone. But it was entirely beyond his previous analysis of the intensity of his own feelings. He had thought he was in full control of himself, and he wasn’t. Somehow, the sardonicism, the half detachment, the objectivity, which he had fancied was the keynote of his own reaction to this situation, didn’t apply at all. The conditioning machine had been thorough.

  He loved this woman with such a violence that the mere touch of her was enough to disconnect his will from operations immediately following. His heart grew quieter as he studied her with a semblance of detachment. She was lovely in a handsome fashion; though almost all robot women of the Dellian race were better looking. Her lips, while medium full, were somehow a trifle cruel; and there was a quality in her eyes that accentuated that cruelty. There were built-up emotions in this woman that would not surrender easily to the necessity of being marooned for life on an unknown planet. It was something he’d have to think over. Until then—

  Maltby sighed, and released her from the three dimensional hypnotic spell that his two minds had imposed on her. He had taken the precaution of turning her away from him. He watched her curiously as she stood, back to him, for a moment very still. Then she walked over to a little knob of trees above the springy, soggy marsh land. She climbed this elevation and gazed in the direction from which he had come a few minutes before. She was evidently looking for him. She turned, finally, shading her eyes against the brightness of the sinking yellow sun; came down from the hillock and saw him.

  She stopped; her eyes narrowed. She walked over slowly and said with an odd edge on her voice: “You came very quietly. You must have circled and walked in from the west.”

  “No,” he said deliberately. “I stayed in the east.”

  She seemed to consider that as she regarded him with a slight frown. She pressed her lips together, finally; there was a bruise there that must have hurt, for she winced, then she said:

  “What did you discover? Did you find any—”

  She stopped. Consciousness of the bruise on her lip must have penetrated at that moment. As her fingers touched the tender spot her eyes came alive with the violence of her comprehension. Before she could speak he said: “Yes, you’re quite right.”

  She stood looking at him; tense with suppressed anger. Finally she relaxed and said in a stony voice: “If you try that again I shall feel justified in shooting you.”

  Maltby shook his head, unsmiling. “And spend the rest of your life here alone? You’d go mad.”

  He saw instantly that her basic anger was too great for that kind of logic. He added swiftly: “Besides, you’d have to shoot me in the back. I have no doubt you could do that in the line of duty. But not enough for personal reasons.” To his amazement there were tears in her eyes. Anger tears, obviously. But tears! She stepped forward quickly and slapped his face. “You robot!” she sobbed.

  He stared at her ruefully; then he laughed and said, with a trace of mockery: “If I remember rightly, the lady who just spoke is the same one who delivered a ringing radio address to all the planets of the Fifty Suns, swearing that in fifteen thousand years, Earth people had forgotten all their prejudices against robots. Is it possible,” he finished, “that the problem on closer investigation is proving more difficult?”

  There was no answer. The Honorable Gloria Cecily brushed past him and disappeared into the interior of the ship. She came out again a few minutes later, her expression serene, and he saw that she had removed all trace of the tears. Her voice was calm as she asked: “What did you discover when you were out? I’ve been delaying my call to the ship until you returned.”

  Maltby said: “I thought they asked you to call at 010 hours.”

  The woman shrugged; and there was a note of arrogance in her voice as she replied:

  “They’ll take my calls when I make them. Did you find any sign of intelligent life?”

  He allowed himself brief pity for a human being who had as many shocks still to absorb as had Grand Captain Laurr. He said finally: “Mostly marsh land in the valley and there’s jungle, very old. Even some of the trees are immense, though sections showed no growth rings—some interesting beasts and a four legged, two armed thing that watched me from a distance. It carried a spear but it was too far away for me to use hypnotism on it. There must be a village somewhere near. Perhaps on the valley rim. My idea is that during the next few months I’ll cut the ship into small sections and transport it to drier ground. I would say that we have
the following information to offer the ship’s scientists. We’re on a planet of a G-type sun. The sun must be larger than the average yellow-white type and have a larger surface temperature. It must be larger and hotter because, though it’s far away, it is hot enough to keep the northern hemisphere of this planet in a semi-tropical condition. The sun was quite a bit north at mid-day, but now it is swinging back to the south. I’d say off-hand that the planet must be tilted about forty degrees, which means there’s a cold winter coming up, though that doesn’t fit with the age and type of vegetation.”

  The lady Laurr was frowning. “It doesn’t seem very helpful,” she said. “But of course, I’m only an executive.” “And I’m only a meteorologist.”

  “Exactly. Come in. Perhaps my astrophysicist can make something of it.”

  “Your astrophysicist!” said Maltby. But he didn’t say it aloud. He followed her into the segment of the ship and closed the door.

  He examined the interior of the main bridge with a wry smile as she seated herself before the astroplate. The very imposing glitter of the instrument board that occupied one entire wall was ironical now. All the machinery it had controlled was far away in space. Once it had dominated the entire Greater Magellanic Cloud; now his own hand gun was a more potent instrument. He grew aware that Lady Laurr was looking up at him.

  “I don’t understand it,” she said. “They don’t answer.” “Perhaps”—Maltby could not keep the faint sardonicism out of his tone—“perhaps they may really have had a good reason for wanting you to call at 010 hours.”

  She made a faint exasperated movement with her facial muscles but did not answer. Maltby went on coolly: “After all, it doesn’t matter. They’re only going through routine motions, the idea being to leave no loophole of rescue unlooked for. I can’t even imagine the kind of miracle it would take for anybody to find us.”