The Reefs of Space

by Frederik Pohl

  "What is that thing?" Ryeland demanded. It looked a little like the seals that Ryeland had seen sunning themselves on the rocks off the maximum-security camp; but it was golden—metallic gold, the gold of the setting sun on bright metal, as it lay bathed in the wash of harsh light from above.

  The thing was alive. It. was, however, no animal that Ryeland had ever seen.

  It lay on the floor of the great metal cage as though exhausted by efforts to escape. The golden fur was bloodied and torn about its head. Some of the bars were bent and bloodstained.

  Whatever it was, it had fought to get free!

  The Togetherness girl said worriedly: "Come away, Steve. Please! Major Chatterji doesn't want anyone to see the spaceling until—" She gasped, confused. She begged: "Forget I said that! I shouldn't have taken you this way at all, but—Oh, please, Steve, come away."

  Reluctantly he let her lead him away. The guard had hurried inside and the enormous metal doors were closed; there was nothing more to see in any case.

  But what was it that he had seen?

  Chapter 4

  At 0700 hours the next morning the teletype rang him out of a deep sleep. Hardly stopping to open his eyes he leaped to answer. It clattered:

  Query. Is Steven Ryeland, Risk, AWC-38440, present?

  Ryeland blanched and instantly tapped out his acknowledgement. All human instincts ordered him to add an apology, but the Machine was not interested in apologies, only in compliance with its rules. It rapped back at him without pause:

  Information. Steady-state hypothesis rests on theory of Fred Hoyle English astronomer physicist 20th century stating that clouds hydrogen gas are continually formed between stars thus replenishing matter converted into energy in stellar power processes. Action. Produce necessary mathematical statements showing when under what conditions process can occur. Action. Make statement as to feasibility additional mathematical statement providing basis for neutralizing or reversing hydrogen formation process.

  Ryeland stared. There was a brief tap at the door and the Togetherness girl danced in, carrying a tray with tea and toast and a glass of pinkish fruit juice. "Good morning, Steven! Rise and shine. I—oh!" He impatiently motioned her to be silent; the teletype, as though that were not enough for him to worry about in a single transmission, emitted the whir of marking impulses for a moment and then clattered out a new message:

  Information. Experimental evidence available indicating existence of drive mechanism not subject to Newton Third Law Motion. Information. Said mechanism referred to as Jetless Drive. Action. Produce necessary mathematical statements providing basis for reproducing Jetless Drive in Plan space vehicles. Action. Review work of Colonel Gottling unified force field as necessary first step.

  Ryeland pulled the tape out of the machine as soon as it was finished and sat staring at it. Somebody, he reflected, had been transferring information from his forbidden books into the Machine!

  Gently Faith removed it from his fingers. "Breakfast," she scolded. "A bath. You'll think better when you're more awake!" Groggily Steve allowed himself to be propelled toward the bath, his mind a whirl of hydrogen clouds and non-Newtonian force fields.

  The steaming shower woke him. By the time he was dressed and sitting down to breakfast with the Togetherness girl he was alert "Jetless drive!" he said. "But there can't be such a thing. Newton's law!"

  "Drink your tea, Steven," she said soothingly. "Would the Machine ask you to do it if it were impossible?"

  "But I can't—well, what experimental evidence? I haven't seen any."

  The Togetherness Girl looked inconspicuously at the watch on her wrist. "Colonel Lescure will be waiting, Steve. Drink your tea."

  The colonel was very crisp in his uniform and white smock. He said: "You're jittery, Ryeland. Relax."

  Steve touched his iron collar significantly. The colonel smiled. "Oh, sure," he said, "but you want to get it off, don't you? And the best way is to relax, because your first job is to listen. I have to tell you about the reefs of space."

  The reefs of space! Ryeland gulped and tried to relax. A numbing fog of bewilderment and pain swirled up around him, across the lost years at the maximum-security camp. He was lying stretched on the couch in the therapy room, with the cold electrodes clamped to his wrists, and the blinding light blazing into his face. Dr. Thrale was standing over him, fat and gentle and apologetic, wheezing out the words spaceling and pyropod and jetless drive and reefs of space, and methodically charting his reactions.

  "Relax, Ryeland." The colonel's voice buzzed out of a great gulf of distance. "We must take this problem one step at a time. The first step is the information which I am to give you now."

  "Sure," Ryeland gasped. "I understand."

  He was trying desperately to relax. Perhaps this information would answer the riddle of those three lost days.

  "Let's have a drink," the Colonel was suggesting. "Talking's thirsty work."

  Ryeland hesitated. Alcohol had always been forbidden, at the academy and at the isolation camp.

  "Come on," said the colonel, twinkling. "A transfusion won't hurt the story."

  He opened a cabinet and took out glasses and a little box. While he poured drinks, Ryeland urged: "Reefs of space? Meteor clouds, perhaps?"

  Pascal Lescure laughed. "More like coral reefs. Here." He touched glasses. 'That's better," he said comfortably, tasting his drink, and he opened the little box.

  A collection of fantastic little animals modeled in plastic spilled out. Ryeland glanced at them only abstractedly; his mind was on what Lescure had said. "But coral is built by living organisms."

  The colonel nodded. "The reefs of space are built by living organisms, too—working over vastly longer stretches of time."

  Ryeland set down his untouched glass violently, slopping it over. "What organisms live in space?"

  "Why," the colonel said seriously, poking at his plastic toys with a finger, "creatures very much like these. They were modeled from life. And before that—the creators of the reefs themselves, simple little one-celled organisms, originating—everywhere!"

  Ryeland forced himself to speak slowly, methodically: "The Machine's orders came this morning. I'm to investigate the steady-state hypothesis. And ever since then I've been thinking—about Hoyle's steady-state theory, and about another speculation he made. That life was born before the planets were, created by the chemical action of ultraviolet light in the cooling clouds of gas and dust around the sun. But how could it survive? The clouds disappear as the planets form."

  "Life adapts," the colonel said heavily, and poked at his dragons.

  He took a fresh drink. "Leaving out the intangibles," he lectured, "life is a phenomenon of matter and energy. The Hoyle Effect provides the matter, in the clouds of new hydrogen that are always being born between the stars. And life makes its own energy."

  "How?"

  "By fusing the hydrogen into heavier elements," the colonel said solemnly.

  He flicked a switch. A screen slid down out of the ceiling. An image appeared on it, the image of little darting bodies, flashing with light, crossing the field of vision. The picture might have been one of pond life under a microscope, except for the difference in shapes ... and for the fact that these creatures gave off a light of their own. "The fusorians," said the colonel somberly. "Hardy little things. They fuse hydrogen atoms and generate energy, and they live in space."

  Fusorians! Ryeland felt his body tense as though an electric shock had passed through it He was conscious of the colonel's gaze on him. and tried to relax, but the colonel studied him thoughtfully for a moment.

  He said only: "No wonder you're excited." He blinked at Ryeland mildly. "This thing is big. It means that the planets are not lonely oases in a dead desert of emptiness. It means that they are islands in an infinite ocean of life —strange life, which we had never suspected."

  "But why haven't any of them ever appeared on Earth?" Ryeland demanded. Infuriating how slowly Lescure spoke! It wa
s life and death to Ryeland—perhaps it was the answer to all his questions—but the colonel treated it only as another lecture, and a rather dull one.

  The colonel shrugged. "Perhaps they drown in air. I suppose the heavier elements are their own waste products, and therefore poisonous to them." He took another pull at his drink. "Perhaps these creatures built the Earth," he said meditatively. "It accounts for the proportions of heavy elements better than the theories of the cosmologists. But of course it doesn't really matter—not to the Plan, I mean."

  Ryeland frowned. There had been something almost disloyal about the colonel's tone. He changed the subject These things—" touching the plastic models—"they aren't fusorians?"

  "No. They're pyropods. They live in the reefs." Irritably the colonel waved a hand. The screen glowed with another picture.

  Ryeland leaned forward staring. "Fairyland!" he breathed.

  The colonel laughed harshly. The view on the screen was of a delicate tracery of glowing vines and plants, where birdlike things moved effortlessly among the branches.

  "Call it that," said the colonel. "I called it other things when I was there. You see, there is a constant new flow of matter into the universe. There is a steady rebirth of hydrogen between the stars. I know—I've seen it!"

  Nervously he took another drink. "It was a few years ago. The pyropods had been seen, but none had been captured. The Planner ordered me out on a hunting trip to catch one."

  Ryeland frowned. "Hunting? But the Plan of Man has no energy to waste on that sort of thing! Every calorie must go to some productive use!"

  "You're an apt pupil," the colonel said wryly, "but it was the Machine's decision, not mine. Or so the Planner said. At any rate, we took off for the planet beyond Pluto. Was there one? It was necessary to assume one, to provide a home for the pyropods—or so we thought. We knew they had no home from Pluto sunwards... .

  "It was a long trip. You know why interstellar flight has never been possible. There's power enough for us to reach the stars, but the difficulty is in finding the reaction mass to hurl away. Once you pass Orbit Pluto you begin to face those problems in practice. We were in the old Cristobal Colon, with hydrion jets. Our reaction mass was water. All we could carry was barely enough to land us on the hypothetical planet. We were to reload there for the flight home, if we found it." The colonel chuckled dryly. "We didn't find it," he said.

  "Then—how did you get back?" Ryeland demanded, startled.

  "We blundered into something. What we called the Rim. Don't confuse it with the Reefs of Space—it wasn't them, not for billions of miles yet. It belongs to the solar system, a scattered swarm of little asteroids, strung in a wide orbit all around the sun. A ring of snowballs, actually. Cold snow—mostly methane and ammonia; but we found enough water to refill our tanks. And then we went on. The Machine's orders had been definite."

  The colonel shivered and finished his drink. "We went out and out," he said, mixing a fresh one, "beyond the Rim, until the sun was just a bright star behind—then not even particularly bright. We were braking, on the point of turning back—-

  "And then we saw the first Reef."

  Colonel Lescure waved at the strange scene on the screen. He began to look alive again. "It didn't look like much at first. A mottled, lopsided mass, not much bigger than the snowballs. But it was luminous!"

  Ryeland found himself gulping his drink. Silently he held out the empty glass and the colonel refilled it without pausing.

  "An unearthly place. We came down in a brittle forest of things like coral branches. Thickets of shining crystal thorns snagged at our spacesuits when we went out exploring. We blundered through metal jungles that tripped and snared us with living wires and stabbed us with sharp blades. And there were stranger things still!

  "There were enormous lovely flowers that shone with uncanny colors—and gave off deadly gamma rays. There was a kind of golden vine that struck back with a high-voltage kick when you touched it. There were innocent little pods that squirted jets of radioactive isotopes.

  "It was a nightmare! But while we were reviving and decontaminating our casualties we worked out the natural history of the Reef. It was a cluster of living fusorian colonies!

  "We counted almost a hundred species. They must have grown from a few spores, drifting in the interstellar hydrogen. The rate of growth must be terribly slow—a few inches, perhaps, in a million years. But the fusorians have time.

  "We looked at each other. We knew we had found something more than we had been sent for.

  "We had found a new frontier."

  Ryeland was on his feet, a sudden uncontrollable surge of emotion driving him there. "Frontier? Could—could people survive out there?"

  "Why not? They're rich with everything we need. There's hydrogen for power, metal for machines, raw materials for food. We brought treasures back with us! We loaded our ship with every sort of specimen we could carry. Fantastic diamond spikes, and masses of malleable iron in perfectly pure crystals. Living prisms that shone with their own cold glow of fusion. Spongy metal mushrooms, in hundred-pound chunks, that tested more than ninety per cent uranium-235. Much more than critical mass! And yet they didn't explode, while they lived. But one chunk did let go after we had jettisoned it in space, and after that we were careful to divide the masses."

  "So that's why the Machine needs a jetless drive?" Ryeland saw a ray of understanding, stabbing through the gray fog of confusion which had followed him from his suite in the maximum-security camp. "To reach the reefs of space—because they're beyond the range of our ion drives!"

  "I suppose so." Lescure nodded. "Though such thinking goes a little beyond our function."

  "But why would the Machine want to explore them?" Ryeland frowned at him. "Is there something in the reefs which could threaten the security of the Plan?"

  "Better not exceed our function," Lescure warned him. "I imagine the planets are pretty well protected from the life of space, by their atmospheres and their Van Alien belts. But of course there was the pyropod that rammed us—"

  "Pyropod?"

  For a second Ryeland was lying on his couch in the therapy room again, with the cold electrodes clamped on his body and Thrale's apologetic voice lisping out the words that had been senseless to him then, jetless drive ... -fusorian ... pyropod.

  Lescure's eyes had narrowed.

  "Ryeland, you appear unduly agitated. I don't quite understand your reactions—unless you have heard this story before."

  "I have not." That, at least, was true. The therapists had always been careful to tell him nothing at all about pyropods or fusorians or the reefs of space.

  For another uncomfortable moment, Lescure stared. "Relax, then." At last he smiled. "Forgive my question. I asked it because there was an unfortunate breach of security. One member of my crew jumped ship after our return. He had managed to steal unauthorized specimens and descriptions of the life of space. Of course he went to the Body Bank."

  His eyes brushed Ryeland again, casually. "I forget the fellow's name. Herrick? Horlick? Horrocks?"

  Ryeland sat still, feeling numb.

  Colonel Lescure waved carelessly, and the screen retracted, shutting itself off. "Drink?" he demanded. Rye-land shook his head, waiting.

  Lescure sighed and poked through his plastic toys. "Here," he said suddenly.

  Ryeland took the tiny thing from him, a two-inch figurine in black and silver with a wicked, knife-edged snout. Lescure's glazed eyes remained on it in fascination. "That's the one that attacked us," he said. "This little thing?"

  The colonel laughed. "It was ninety feet long," he said. He took it back from Steve and patted it. "Vicious little creature," he said, half fondly. "Evolution has made them vicious, Ryeland. They are living war rockets. They've been hammered into a horrible perfection, by eternities of evolution."

  He swept the whole menagerie back into its box. "But they are only rockets," he said thoughtfully. "They need mass, too. We've cut up a dozen of them, and
the squid is as much a rocket as they... . Perhaps that accounts for their voracity. They'll attack anything, with a hungry fury you can't imagine. Mass is not plentiful in space, and they need what they can find.

  "At any rate, this one rammed us, and—well, we had another dozen casualties." The colonel shrugged. "It was touch and go, because the thing was faster than we. But ultimately the survivors manned a torpedo station, and then the contest was over.

  "Even the pyropods have not achieved a jetless drive."

  "If there is such a thing," said Ryeland.

  Colonel Lescure chuckled. He looked thoughtfully at Ryeland, as though choosing which of several to make. Finally he said: "You don't think the Team Attack will succeed?"

  Ryeland said stiffly: "I will do my best, Colonel. But Newton's Third Law—"

  Colonel Lescure laughed aloud. "Ah, well," he said, "who knows? Perhaps it won't succeed. Perhaps there is no jetless drive." Hilariously amused, though Ryeland could not tell why, he tossed the box of plastic figurines back in a cupboard.

  "Ugly little things, good night," he said affectionately.

  Ryeland commented: "You sound as though you like them."

  "Why not? They don't bother us. If they haven't attacked the earth in the past billion years or so, they aren't likely to start very soon. They aren't adapted for atmosphere, or for direct, strong sunlight. Only a few of the strongest ventured in beyond Orbit Pluto to be sighted, before our expedition. None was ever seen in closer than Orbit Saturn—and that one, I think, was dying."

  Ryeland was puzzled. "But—you spoke of danger."

  “The danger that lurks in the Reefs of Space, yes!"

  "But, if it isn't the pyropods, then what is it?"

  "Freedom!" snapped Colonel Lescure, and clamped his lips shut.

  Chapter 5

  Faith carried Ryeland off to his next interview. "You liked Colonel Lescure, didn't you?" she chattered. "He's such a nice man. If it were up to him, the reefrat wouldn't be suffering—" She stopped, the very picture of embarrassed confusion.