by Brian N Ball
Buchanan’s mind reeled. He struggled for sanity, for breath, for memory. Then, there was peace. Calmness came like an explosion.
There was the boiling tumult as the Quasi-warp merged with the bizarre equilibrium of forces that made up the time-locked tunnel; and then nothing. Utter calm possessed the life-raft.
“Take over,” said Maran.
Buchanan forced his mind to clear and his hands to obey his will. But he trembled, the big gauntlets hardly able to manipulate the simple controls of the console. All was impatience, dread, incoherency, unplanned haste. Yet he could steer the battered raft through the gaping hole where the bridge of the Altair Star had once been. Terribly afraid, but unable to avoid facing the remains of the ship, he slid the raft with easy skill toward his last infragalactic command.
It was as bad as he had feared.
Buchanan ignored Maran’s restraining hand. He clambered out of the raft and crossed the ruin of the deck. All about him, the tenuous energies of the Quasi-warp shimmered and coruscated in a weird merging with the white-gold of the eerie tunnel. There was an area of complete calm where the two sets of forces met. Buchanan walked toward the splayed figures of his crewmen. Preston was there, frozen in the act of ripping out a bank of memory-coils. A crewman whose name he had never been able to remember was beside him. Both, he sensed, might move at the approach of his armored figure. Their limbs still seemed to have the elasticity of flesh and muscle that indicates life; Preston’s hair tumbled over his face—Buchanan expected him to brush it from his eyes in the familiar half-irritated gesture he knew so well. Behind these two were other figures—crewmen, three other men Buchanan had seen in the passengers’ lounges. Maybe they had some knowledge of the machines whose destruction Buchanan had ordered. Some held ripping tools. To the last, they had tried to save the ship.
Buchanan stopped, halted by an appalling, gruesome thought.
Were Kochan’s theorists right?—were these splayed figures held in some kind of shadowy hinterland, between life and death? Was the blonde-haired girl with the haunted eyes somewhere beyond the wrecked bridge, waiting in a timeless moment for the death that should have come three years before? Was it the same all over the ship?
“No!” whispered Buchanan, afraid to go on. The huge liner might be a gigantic mausoleum, as Kochan believed. But one that held the undead. He yelled out in tormented grief, quintessential terror and primeval dread striking through him as he thought of the hundreds of unliving yet undying in their time-struck ranks throughout the riven ship. Events in time seemed to telescope once more, and he saw again the uncomprehending fears of the passengers turn to grim knowledge as the ship began its last, fluttering plunge into the Singularity.
He could say nothing, nor could he move.
His soul revolted.
How long he might have stood, huge in the deep-space armor, he could not tell; perhaps he might have gone beyond the pool of calmness formed by the Quasi-warp and toward the glittering, beckoning areas where the splayed bodies hung. It could have happened, for he was oppressed by a nightmarish surge of guilt grief, and horror; a few steps would have taken him into the limbo where time seemed to have stopped.
Maran prevented any such move.
“Buchanan, I need you to direct the machines!” boomed the amplified voice. Buchanan surfaced, leaving the waking dream.
Maran. Here, in the vast charnel-house. Maran intruding in this haunting and terrible place. It was unthinkable.
He must be got out.
Buchanan turned and broke into a lunging run.
“Stop!” boomed the vast voice. “Think of Miss Deffant, Buchanan—think of yourself! Think of this ship!”
And Buchanan, having no thoughts at all, only a sense of outrage, was halted by the sheer confidence of Maran’s orders. He was brought back to a measure of sanity, and he could recall his situation, that of Liz Deffant, why and how he had reached the Altair Star and what he was to do about the pitiful, silent remains of the liner’s crew and passengers.
“Buchanan, this Quasi-warp protects us, you and me! But it can’t hold for long! I need you to help me get the robots to build a drive, Buchanan! I haven’t got enough time to redirect their programs. Help me, Buchanan, and you return to Miss Deffant at the station!”
Buchanan stared at the armored figure. He could see Maran’s anxiety. Turn Maran loose? Certainly the Altair Star’s engines could power a drive—and there was a fully-equipped boat that was capable of reaching the nearer constellations; add one or two of the big engines to its sturdy hull and you would have a ship that could cross the galaxy.
Buchanan thought of Liz Deffant. And then of Kochan’s granddaughter.
“Maran, do you know why I came here?” he said, his voice hollowly echoing around the inside of the helmet and setting up fresh echoes in the wreck of the liner.
“Yes,” said Maran, and Buchanan saw his eyes, always estimating, always planning, full of awareness. “I know, Buchanan. You came to find why you failed.”
“I didn’t fail!”
“You failed.”
“It was the robots!”
“No robot can defeat a determined man.”
“They took the screens down—they let the Altair Star sink into this!” And Buchanan indicated the glittering, menacing tunnel where the lost ships eddied slowly.
“Order the machines to build a drive, and I’ll tell you why you failed.” Buchanan felt a sense of helplessness. “You can’t escape the cruisers.”
“Buchanan, would it help if I said I believed that too?”
Buchanan could not face the self-questioning that stormed into his mind. He said quickly: “Yes, Maran!”
“Then I promise you, Buchanan, that I have every reason to believe escape from the Singularity impossible.”
“Tell me. Where I failed. Why— this.” And he gestured heavily to the gap beyond where the bridge had been, and where Preston had led the assault on the machines in the last vain effort to hold back the long night.
What did it matter that Maran should have a lifeboat, however powered? Buchanan had to know why the robots of the Altair Star had quietly surrendered seven hundred lives.
“The machines were faced with an anomaly,” said Maran.
“I know that.”
“Then you should have expected their reaction.”
Buchanan thought of the last moments of the Altair Star. Think calmly, logically, coherently, at such a time? Yet he had done what he thought best. At the Court of Inquiry there had even been congratulations.
“That’s all?”
“Buchanan, faced with the impossible, they decided that their function was at an end.” And then he could imagine the machines’ calm decision —could almost hear their flat voices, almost see the relays flickering to the inevitable conclusion.
“They gave up because—”
“Because they decided that their context could not be, Buchanan. If their surroundings were becoming impossible, so were they!”
Buchanan repeated hollowly: “If their surroundings were impossible, so were they! Everything about them could not be—could not exist!—so they stopped!”
“Now you have it,” said Maran. “Accept it.”
“You didn’t.”
Maran was almost sympathetic. “I am Maran.” He was silent for a moment, and then his voice boomed around the hulk: “Call to your machines, Buchanan.”
Buchanan laughed. He had found Maran’s weakness, The man had forgotten that the machines were outside the Quasi-warp’s protective fields.
“You’ll have to awaken the dead,” he said. “Maran, how can I reach the memory-banks?”
“Watch!”
Maran spoke and the life-raft seemed to come alive. Its small engines jerked and thrashed at his commands, and the little vessel shivered as power screamed from its drive. Dazed by the blast which rocked the big liner’s hulk, Buchanan became aware only gradually of the increasing strength of the Quasi-warp.
“
Don’t!” he yelled suddenly, aware that the tenuous glories of the eerie field were creeping beyond the space where the bridge had been.
“Maran—don’t let it touch them!”
Horrified, he watched as the bizarre forces of time-locked tunnel and strange Quasi-warp met and merged. The strange warp began to invest more of the Altair Star; but Buchanan’s eyes were riveted on the splayed, fresh bodies.
“It has to be done!” boomed Maran.
“But they—they’re not dead!”
He would have hurled himself at Maran had he not been rendered stiff with fresh horror by the sight of the bodies; for, as the Quasi-warp reached them, merging with the tunnel’s coruscating white-gold, the processes of death reasserted themselves; and Buchanan saw time run its course. The bodies decayed. Preston was a ghastly gray-green sight, his handsome features billowing with mold; and, within seconds, the features had gone and only white bone remained. Time surged on and bone crumbled, turned to dust, was swept about in the gusting fields so powerfully countered by the combined drives of the station and the little raft. Buchanan breathed a prayer.
It was for himself. He did not want to think of what was happening throughout the lounges and private cabins of the Altair Star.
“They were always dead!” Maran snapped. “Buchanan, nothing can reverse death—nothing! It was held back, but that’s all—there was never anything you could do for them!” There was more than anxiety in his voice, Buchanan recognized; the man was oppressed by the aura of the doomed ship. The ghosts clamored throughout its deck, now released from some weird limbo that had held them, while outside, in the slowly wheeling Galaxy, three years had passed.
“Buchanan, order the machines to regard me as commander, and then return to the station!” Buchanan moved ponderously toward the small dust-heaps. Why not help Maran? There was nothing he could do now for the Altair Star. Its frozen moment was over. Only he was left, after the passage of the years. The time-locked tunnel had released the undead. The fabric of its grotesque white-gold fields had been burst open. Why not let Maran get what he wanted from its depths?
He passed more heaps of dust where clusters of men and women had waited. Terrified groups, facing eternity together. He reached a master-console and was not even surprised when it glowed into life at his touch. He gave the brief instructions and returned.
“Ask Miss Deffant to watch,” Maran said.
Watch what? But Buchanan did not care.
Maran moved decisively. He pointed to the battered raft, edging Buchanan toward the port. “Go back, Buchanan. Go to Miss Deffant! Tell her Maran said she should watch!”
“I’ll tell her,” said Buchanan.
The last he saw of Maran was his broad back, unnaturally huge in the deep-space armor, radiant with the fires of the Quasi-warp.
CHAPTER 20
Liz Deffant saw the return of the life-raft with anguish. She rushed to the hold to see Buchanan, huge and armored against the gold-shot tiny black pits which opened in the fabric of the station. She waited as the robots took off his suit
She knew that he had seen things too terrible to speak of.
“Come,” she said.
Buchanan did not notice that she was unsurprised to see him return alone. She half pushed, half led him to the grav-chute and the cabin above. Only when they reached the bridge did Buchanan speak.
“Liz,” he said with a disbelieving calm, “Liz, they were there. They were all there—in the ship.”
“Later, Al,” whispered Liz. “See!”
Buchanan automatically reached for sensor-pads as the big screen burst into life. Scanners roved; the screen pulsed, cleared, and settled. It was the Altair Star.
Buchanan and Liz Deffant were fascinated by the rippling, bunding, utterly alien surge of power as the massive engines of the ship began to weave the impossible, monstrous web of forces summoned into being by Maran’s strange genius. They saw a great band of energies eerily combine to form a single Quasi-warp that pushed aside the eddying configurations of the time-locked tunnel.
“He’s going,” whispered Liz Deffant, but the words were barely audible, only a thin breathing, an automatic carry-over from a forgotten state of mind. The majesty of the thing she and Buchanan watched obliterated all else.
The big lifeboat of the Altair Star was the source of the Quasi-warp. It nosed out of the rent in the lost ship’s side, and colossal shards of the strange tunnel gave way before it. The Quasi-warp bent the fabric of the tunnel.
The scanners held the terrible majesty of the scene. The screen flowered with renewed violence; the lifeboat was a star-center. Waves of energies began to rock the station. Buchanan’s hands shook. His mind cleared at last. “Maran!” he said urgently. “He’s using the boat to escape!” It hadn’t been at all important aboard the lost ship; but here, at the station, Buchanan was again a Galactic Service employee, responsible to the Council and aware of Maran’s inexplicable and unholy powers.
Liz Deffant gripped his arm. “Al—watch!”
By her tone he knew that she was in possession of information he had missed. There was a resigned, sad tone in her voice that he recognized. He had no time to consider it, for the lifeboat became a blossoming cancer, white-gold in a sea of fragmented, blistered, impossibly complex black-lighted powers. The Quasi-warp was demolishing the entire time-locked tunnel.
From the center of the sea of black shards, the lifeboat rose up and hung, poised. The station was hurled away by the hurricane that was its wake. Yet the scanners kept to their task; Buchanan and Liz Deffant clearly saw the end of the Altair Star.
It was one of a score of ships that danced, whirled, and spun zanily in the wash set up by Maran’s overpowered boat. The Altair Star lurched end over end. A tiny, ancient rocketship cannoned into it. Were its crew even now joining the ranks of the dead? It was a grotesque, fantastic sight; the thought of the crew of the ancient, tiny ship which had adventured so many centuries before across the gulfs, was strangely haunting. Other ships smashed into one another. Fragments of lost ships too joined the crazy corybantics set up by the Quasi-warp.
The two appalled watchers saw the lifeboat begin to surge forward, full of power. Blackness boiled around the wrecks. The Quasi-warp completed the destruction of the impossible runnel that held them,
“He’s going out!” Buchanan began to say. “Maran’s—”
“No,” said Liz, with a surprising harshness. “See!” Buchanan looked into the depths behind what was left of the tunnel.
A blank, terrifying emptiness had opened at the core of the Singularity. Buchanan’s thoughts spun. Somewhere among his memories was Maran’s triumphant yell: “An entire new Universe!” Was it?
It was a hole, a pit, a sink of energy, a nothingness, an alien and empty pathway of pure night, black, and lost, blank and void.
The poised lifeboat seemed to hesitate.
“No!” Liz Deffant cried, responding to the eerie emptiness of the gaping pit. “No, Maran!” Flooding with tendrils of white-gold glory, the great drive that had once powered the Altair Star built to a crescendo. The lifeboat pulsed, glowing, blasting, roaring forward, driven by the huge engines. Straight into the black hole.
“Gone!” breathed Buchanan.
There was more to follow, equally strange.
“Dear God, the Altair Star!” Buchanan gasped.
He and Liz saw the ghost-fleet spin slowly around the wreckage of the time-locked tunnel. And then they resumed their interrupted voyages.
They were free of the grip of the bizarre enigma.
One by one, the long-lost ships followed the still-writhing wake of Maran’s lifeboat. In a stately procession, like carriages in a funeral cortege, the ships descended into the terrible emptiness. Buchanan was nerveless, stupefied.
He watched the end of the Altair Star. For seconds, it was outlined against the white-gold translucence, and then it was gone. The dust of so many human beings was on its way to the most weird interment ever known. The g
reat infragalactic liner, at last, was gone.
“It’s over,” said Liz.
Buchanan felt a curious sense of relief. His ghosts were truly laid. And then he thought of Maran. What strange Universe had received him!
“Maran?” he asked Liz.
“He left a message.”
Together, they listened to the deep, powerful recorded voice: “Miss Deffant! Buchanan! The station is now yours. Maran will trouble you no longer. If Maran is wrong, he will trouble the Galaxy no more.” There was a change of tone, and Buchanan sensed an edge of regret. No human being could renounce all he had known without some feeling of apprehension. “Maran recognized your nobility of spirit, Miss Deffant. Buchanan is a fortunate man. As for Maran, he will try to enter into the Universe he saw. It may be that in another kind of life, he will be able to continue his investigations into the greatest of all mysteries. For, make no mistake, the structure which exists in the Jansky Singularity is no accident!
Maran recognizes the handiwork of an intelligent entity. So Maran leaves you and the Galaxy that rejected him to find beings capable of understanding his ambitions.” Quietly, he added: “Think of Maran, Miss Deffant.”
Buchanan shivered.
It was like listening to a recording of a dead man’s words.
“It is all over,” he said.
“Is it?” Liz asked.
“Yes! For us, yes!”
CHAPTER 21
Lientand saw that the station had suffered. Unguessable forces had eaten at its fabric. Whole sections had been smashed clear away. No darting scanners roamed before it. It was a blind, crippled, failing nugget of technology that had just managed to stagger clear of the appalling chaos within the Singularity. Nevertheless, helpless as the station appeared, Lientand kept his cruisers’ main armament on it.
“Still no beamed transmissions, sir,” reported his lieutenant “The life-support systems are working, but there’s not much power.”
