by Brian N Ball
“Al!” she whispered as at last she saw the familiar honed features, the long sinewy frame, the bitter mouth which had begun to be able to ease into a smile.
There was a new expression on his face.
Before, he had looked tired, despairing, a man who thought of himself as a failure. Now, he seemed completely lost. Cold, alone, lost.
She watched until the image shivered and began to fill with shadows. The great engines of the ES 110
impinged on the little shuttle’s own force-bands.
With a gentle shudder, the unmanned shuttle dropped into the dock of the looming infragalactic ship.
CHAPTER 4
Eleven members of the Board for the Regulation of Space Hazards turned out for the launching of the Jansky Singularity Station. There was a minimum of coverage by the news media. Buchanan’s appointment had stirred the newscasters to a fresh appraisal of the dangers of the Jansky Singularity, and they emphasized especially the loss of the Altair Star; but interest soon waned. Kochan had used some of his vast, submerged powers to see that the affair was played down. Yet nothing of the turmoil that surged in Kochan’s mind was reflected on his face as he shook Buchanan’s hand and wished him a successful voyage and a safe return.
It was a cold day, with a chill wind howling among the docked ships. Buchanan saw that Mrs. Blankfort was ill, and worried too. There was an anxious look in her deep-sunken eyes. He knew that her concern was for him. The members of the Board withdrew to take warm drinks when the brief ceremony of commissioning was over.
Buchanan entered the ship and forgot them.
And then he waited as an enormous tug latched onto the squat ugly station.
“Jansky Station clear for lift-off,” a metallic voice told him. “Engaging first stage of flight schedule.”
“Yes,” said Buchanan, hardly able to believe that the days had passed and that now the ship trembled around him as the tug exerted its huge powers.
“Second stage commencing now,” the robot told him.
“Good.”
There was nothing to be said, nothing to be done, for the station and its throw-away monstrous tug were in robotic hands until they reached the edges of the colossal rotating enigma that had clawed in so many unwary ships. Then the tug would fall away. And the station would be his.
“You should take your position for lift-off,” the robot voice told him. Buchanan looked at the cone-shaped pedestal which was the station’s robot overseer. Anger shook him momentarily. Mrs. Blankfort was wrong. You could hate the robots. Even if they were capable of making far better decisions than any human mind in the uncertain reaches between the spiraling arms of the Galaxy.
The ship was poised now, almost a living thing.
Buchanan settled into the soft couch. Tendrils of resilient plastics settled in a web around him. Power raged into the main drive of the tug. The edges of the large deck began to blur as the ship began to enter into the disagreeable phenomenon of Phase. Sharp angles became rounded, straight lines took on uneasy curves, flat surfaces bent and rose up eerily.
“Lift-off, Commander Buchanan?”
It was a formality, a concession to the lost status of the nominal commander. An ironical request, part of an old ritual. The robot was programmed to ask his permission to begin the long voyage.
“Proceed,” said Buchanan formally.
“Welcome aboard, Miss Deffant,” the commander of the ES 110 said to Liz Deffant. She appreciated the frank sincerity of his admiration. “You’re not exactly what we expected, you know. We got the authorization for a New Settlements Bureau ecologist, female, and they usually turn out to be large and dedicated and not altogether— well, feminine.” He paused and took in the sharp thrust of the well-formed breasts and the promise of the firm long legs. “Not what we expected at all.” Liz smiled at him. It took no effort at all. He was a youngish man, not yet thirty, short and broad, with heavy features and hair like wire. When he grinned he showed large white teeth, and his eyes shone with pleasure. She wondered if it was a sign of recovery that she could respond to his animal good spirits.
“This isn’t what I expected of an Enforcement Service ship,” she said. It wasn’t. There was nothing to distinguish the control deck of the big infragalactic ship from, say, one of the New Settlements Bureau’s larger support ships, the kind that had acted as a back-up station when she was working the Ophiuchi Complex. There were operations screens, the usual robotic control pedestal, the banks of consoles with weaving sensor-pads alert to fasten onto a human palm, the big command chair for the human commander—the usual setup; and an unexpected spaciousness. She had expected more spartan conditions, perhaps a feeling of oppressive detention.
“Tell me what you expected, Miss Deffant.”
“Liz.”
“I’m Jack Rosario. You’ll meet the others when we eat.”
“The crew?”
“We carry six, including myself.” Rosario’s gesture took in the controls. “So tell me what you expected.” Liz looked about the bright bridge, all golden yellow and green plastics. “It doesn’t look like a traveling jail. I could be on a tourist deck—I thought you’d all be carrying side arms—”
“Side arms!” hooted Rosario. “Phasers!”
“Well—”
“No! There’s no need. Not since we went fully automatic. We haven’t gone in for that sort of thing since the coma-cells were introduced.”
“Coma-cells?”
“We’ve used them for years. Its easier for all of us— crew, guards, expellees. We’re entirely automatic.”
“You put the expellees into a coma?”
“Yes. Haven’t you seen an Enforcement Service ship before?”
“I’ve seen them. Twice. But I’ve never been aboard one so far. Not until now. It wasn’t my idea. It’s just that I wanted to get back to Messier 16 as soon as I could.”
Rosario’s broad face was interested, but he did not follow up with a question; he caught the hint of regret in her voice. She liked the way he did not pursue the subject.
“So we should be wearing side arms and have bunches of keys on our belts. And you should hear chains rattling and prisoners groaning.” He grinned. “And there’d be water and a bone you wouldn’t care to identify. That it?”
Liz smiled again. Rosario was like the people she remembered from her home planet Straightforward, kindly, competent. Not bitter and lost. Not at all like Al.
“I was wrong.”
Rosario looked at her speculatively.
“You’re with Galactic Service. You must be well thought of to get a shuttle out to us. Would it disturb you too much to see how we carry the prisoners?”
Liz felt, for the first time, the authoritative strength of Jack Rosario. He was a member of a service which carried out with a ruthless efficiency the judgments and penalties of the Galactic courts. Enforcement meant just that. Find offenders, bring them to the courts, and ferry those expelled out to the Rim. Rosario was the commander of an expellee-transport. He was offering to show her the human cargo of the ES
110: the prisoners.
“I don’t know,” said Liz honestly.
“Think about it.”
He called a low-grade robot servitor to show her to a guest cabin. She noticed that the robot was constructed along heavier lines than the usual run of servitors. Its antennas scanned her, and she was sure that a complete rundown of her physical characteristics was already on its way to the Enforcement Service vessel’s memory-banks. There was a hint of menace in its squat, armored bulk. She wondered if she had made a mistake.
A few more days at Center would have been tolerable.
Buchanan waited until the mad corybantics of warped force-bands settled to a comprehensible pattern as the tug drilled through the continuums on its vast, looping voyage toward the bizarre Singularity. It seemed that small metallic hands clawed at the fabric of his brain, such was the shock of the first moments of thrust. The station had not the stability of an infr
agalactic liner. It was small. A small blip containing the life-support systems for one man, but a blip that would soon ride on three enormous storehouses of energy. The sheer brute power was needed if the ship was to hold in the unreal dimensions.
Buchanan gloated in the latent power of those three great pods. Strange configurations existed within the Singularity. Ordinary ships would be swamped by one blind spasm. The station was built to withstand the unknown.
Would it?
When the ship was riding more easily, Buchanan pushed aside the clinging limpet-like tendrils that held him. He stood up and shook his head. Black light flashed before his eyes, but the worst was over.
“Give me an estimate of the duration of the voyage,” he ordered the robot controller.
“We’re holding onto a subgalactic surge,” said the robotic controller. “It’s a large wave, sir. Present estimates put the ship’s arrival at the Singularity in seventeen hours, sir. That is, of course, approximately. It could be a little less.”
“It could?” Buchanan said, without interest. At one time he would have checked the projections for the weird path among the starways of the continuums. It would have pleased him to see what interstellar gales they could have ridden among, what freak quakings of expiring supernovas they could have caught onto to add impetus to the great surge of the engines. Not now. Let the robots do the easy work. The routine duties.
“What’s happening at the Singularity?”
“No measurable changes since the last batch of reports, sir. It maintains a regular rotating shape, giving the readings of a gaseous fluid bound by its own gravitational attraction. No profound seismological disturbances of the kind associated with starquake, sir.”
It was reassuring. No sign yet of the monstrous Singularity ripping space apart. No starquake. The thing within the Singularity could set up a time-space event that shattered the continuums around it with a colossal flurry of unknown forces. And if a ship should chance to be nearby, then that ship was lost. But now the Singularity was quiescent.
At the moment it was a bland, eerie, alien beast: an event in the Galaxy like no other. An inexplicable thing, unguessable, atone, singular, as the old-time physicists had it, a Singularity! At present, inactive.
“A drink,” said Buchanan.
“Yes, sir.”
Ice tinkled in the glass. Buchanan followed the single drink with a request for a modest meal. “I’ll eat,” he said.
It was forthcoming within two minutes.
Buchanan looked at the well-done steak and the salad. Then at the glass of wine, deep-red, full-bodied, delicious. He smiled. An endless recycling. All of it back through his own system into the tanks, then out to the culture-frames, then to the preparation-units; and so onto a silver tray brought by a deferential servitor. There was an excellent catering service. The Board had gone to some trouble to provide for his particular tastes. He laughed.
This meal could be the last of its kind.
He savored it, just as he savored the memory of the girl with the golden-brown eyes who had reached in pity to wipe the deep lines from his forehead. It had been such a near thing too. He had almost returned to a normal life, almost cast off the load of guilt and grief that rode him like some great foul wen. Another man, much older, took over the bridge when Rosario said it was time to eat. He was introduced as Poole. Liz had the feeling he resented her presence aboard the ES 110. She understood, she thought. Few women would serve on such ships. It was one area of public service which was almost entirely a male preserve.
The crew she met at dinner were equally impressed by Liz Deffant. Two were Security men, another, like Jack Rosario, a crewman. They were introduced one by one.
Liz remembered their names carefully. The Security men were large and alike in physical appearance: tough, hard-looking men in their thirties. There was a Dieter and a Mack. Rosario explained that a third was on duty. He ate later. A young fair-haired man who followed Liz’s every movement with an unbelieving wide-eyed stare was called Tup.
The conversation was general, mostly questions about Liz’s experiences with the New Settlements Bureau. She told them about the last project she had worked on, the experiments with Terran-type plant-life on a fairly hostile planet in the Ophiuchi Complex. It had absorbed her, and the men recognized that she spoke with knowledge and enthusiasm. They had enough technical knowledge to grasp the central problem—the planet had an aberrant gravitational core, so plants didn’t grow with the same kind of cell-structure as on Terran-type worlds; rejigging the planet’s heavy metal core was possible, but that involved the possibility of disturbing several other ecological features. The Bureau regarded major reconstruction as a last resort.
She explained how they had been baffled until someone came up with the idea of making a slight molecular realignment of new root formation to give the newly-introduced plants a firmer base; and that had done the trick. When she finished she realized that she had not thought of Buchanan for an hour. It seemed like a betrayal She could not be glad about it She was silent for minutes. Rosario worried, Liz could see. He stared at her when he thought she was not watching him, and he frowned when the meal was over. The others left, except for Tup. Liz was aware that they sensed her misery.
“Does it worry you—the fact that we are a transport for expellees?” asked Rosario.
“No,” said Liz. It did, though. Subtly, there was a sense of tired and defeated evil aboard the Enforcement Service vessel.
“Would you like to see the cells?” said Tup eagerly.
“You could,” agreed Rosario. They were both making a strong effort to please her; but Liz had no special desire to see the condemned men and women.
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re not against the idea of transporting the expellees out to the Rim, are you, Liz?” asked Rosario.
“Is that what’s troubling you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Liz, hesitantly. “But don’t worry about me. I’m sorry if I seem to be out of sorts— please don’t worry about me.”
Rosario grinned.
“All right. Now I have to go to the bridge. It’s Poole’s turn to eat.” To Tup he said, “If you can get Miss Deffant to change her mind, show her around the ship.”
The youth could hardly believe his luck. “Me, Jack— sir?”
“She’s with Galactic,” said Rosario. “No restrictions.” As he was walking across to the grav-chute, Tup said, “Miss Deffant could have a look at Maran.”
“Maran!” Liz was shocked into the exclamation.
Rosario stopped. He saw Liz’s distress, yet his face was hard.
It could have been the wild and bitter days of the Mad Wars all over again. Maran was the greatest cyberneticist of all time. The human mind: that was his workshop. Maran’s obsession was the inner depths. Liz shivered. She knew something of obsessions. In a small way, Buchanan was an example of what utter obsessiveness could do. Maran was the far extreme.
“When I think what he did—” she began.
“And what he hoped to do,” Rosario said.
“Come and see him,” said Tup, who looked from Liz to the ES 110’s commander. “You’ll never get the chance again.”
“No,” said Rosario. “No one will. Except those at the Rim.” She knew what he meant. A humane Galaxy had reverted to the oldest law of all. Those who could not live by a community’s code of ethics must leave. When there was no possibility of redemption, when a man or woman put himself or herself beyond any hope of forgiveness, the verdict was inevitable. To do more was barbarous. To do less was to imperil the community.
The aberrant were cast out.
“There’s nothing to be alarmed about, Miss Deffant,” said Tup. He was, perhaps, enjoying her discomfiture. “Maran’s unconscious. They all are. Coming, Miss Deffant?” Maran aboard the ship. Liz did not answer for some seconds. She was still absorbing the idea that he was somewhere in the cavernous depths of the prison-ship.
I can open
a million years of evolution, was his simple, sublime claim. If a few must be sacrificed to show what the human mind is, then why not?
Liz caught herself gasping at the simple enormity of what he said. And at the center of it all, a terrifying logic.
“Don’t press her,” ordered Rosario.
“You won’t get the chance again, Miss Deffant,” Tup insisted. He grinned placatingly at Rosario. “She can tell them at Messier 16 that she saw Maran.”
“Don’t go down if you don’t want to.” Rosario said.
Liz’s thoughts were confused. She had seen the newscasts, with Maran stating his case so lucidly. There was a calmness about him that had fascinated all who saw him. And Maran was absolutely right in his main point.
Man was a unique phenomenon. There was only one intelligence in the whole of the Galaxy. Perhaps in the whole of creation. It must be understood, this thing called man, Maran had said. We must know the when and the how and the why of its beginnings!
When the gruesome details of Maran’s experiments were revealed, it was difficult to equate the calmness with the horrific things he had done to fellow human beings. We must gouge out the secrets of a million years, he had insisted. Find the beginning, understand the mechanism of transition from thing to man!
There was only one mystery, according to Maran. The mind of man. And he had devised his strange machines to investigate the human psyche. At first there were volunteers. The Enforcement Service moved in when the news of what had happened to them began to filter out. By that time, he had agents recruiting “helpers” in remote and primitive systems. Gullible men and women responded to his promises of wealth and mystical power. They were furious when the cruisers shipped them back to their barbaric planets. Maran had charisma. His simple, monumental message had enormous potency. Find the moment of man’s emergence to knowledge! Hold the moment, freeze it in time; examine, understand, develop it; and build the psyche into a cosmic engine! Liz recalled the arguments. To so many, they had become a catechism.
