Laird’s dark, worn face twisted in a bleak smile. “Certainly. This civilization isn’t ready for such things. Even Vwyrdda wasn’t, and it’ll take us millions of years to reach their stage. Besides, it was part of the bargain.”
“Bargain?”
“Just as certainly. Daryesh and I still had to live together, you know. Life under suspicion of mutual trickery, never trusting your own brain, would have been intolerable. We reached an agreement during that long voyage back to Sol, and used Vwyrddan methods of autohypnosis to assure that it could not be broken.”
He looked somberly out at the lunar night. “That’s why I said the genie in the bottle killed me. Inevitably, the two personalities merged, became one. And that one was, of course, mostly Daryesh, with overtones of Laird.
“Oh, it isn’t so horrible. We retain the memories of our separate existences, and the continuity which is the most basic attribute of the ego. In fact, Laird’s life was so limited, so blind to all the possibilities and wonder of the universe, that I don’t regret him very often. Once in a while I still get nostalgic moments and have to talk to a human. But I always pick one who won’t know whether or not to believe me, and won’t be able to do much of anything about it if he should.”
“And why did you go into Survey?’’ I asked, very softly.
“I want to get a good look at the universe before the change. Daryesh wants to orient himself, gather enough data for a sound basis of decision. When we—I—switch over to the new immortal body, there’ll be work to do, a galaxy to remake in a newer and better pattern by Vwyrddan standards! It’ll take millennia, but we’ve got all time before us. Or I do—what do I mean, anyway?” He ran a hand through his gray-streaked hair.
“But Laird’s part of the bargain was that there should be as nearly normal a human life as possible until this body gets inconveniently old. So—” He shrugged. “So that’s how it worked out.”
We sat for a while longer, saying little, and then he got up. “Excuse me,” he said. “There’s my wife. Thanks for the talk.”
I saw him walk over to greet a tall, handsome red-haired woman. His voice drifted back: “Hello, Joana—”
They walked out of the room together in perfectly ordinary and human fashion.
I wonder what history has in store for us.
Behind the Black Nebula
By L. Ron Hubbard
THE LANDING prison ship hovered a space above the field as though arrested by the titanic battle in progress below, but in reality only waiting for the assembly of a securing crew.
Hie Crystal Mines, beyond the mystery of the Black Nebula and in a world unlike anything anywhere in space outside, rippled in the waves of heat and shuddered under the rapid impact of fast-firing arc cannon. A desolate and grim outpost, the last despair of convicts for seventy-five years, the latest hope of a fuel-starved empire of space, racked continually by attack.
The Crystal Mines, where disgraced officers came to battle through their last days against forces which had as yet defied both analysis and weapon. Heartbreak and misery and war beneath a roof of steel and upon strangely quivering ground, amid vapors and gasses which put commas and then periods to the fives of the luckless criminals sent here as a punishment transcending in violence even slow execution.
Gedso Ion Brown stood at the port in awed silence, caught by the unleashed fury in the scene below and forgetting even the danger and mystery of their course into this place. For here below had come to being things more strange than any described in the folklore of any planet in a setting which he realized no man could adequately describe.
Below were metal blocks, the mine barracks and offices, sufficient to house half a million men. They crept up the side of a concave cliff like a stairway until they nearly touched the embedded edge of the mine roof. Curving down into the white stones of the valley was a spun silica wall a hundred meters high, studded at thirty-pace intervals by cannon turrets. The mine, the roof, the wall, all were contained in an immense cavern which was reached through a hundred-and-eighty-kilometer tunnel seven kilometers in diameter.
The light had no apparent source, seeming to exude from cliffs and ceiling and ground, possibly from the perfectly formed, sharp boulders, the size of ships, strewn everywhere, lodged everywhere, even hanging from the ceiling. These were a translucent white and constituted the product of the mine.
Up and down the wall went the lashing trajectories of the arc cannon, raking over the scorched and smoking ground, reaching in hysterical fury at the lumbering attackers.
Gedso Ion Brown put a pocket glass to his eye and looked wonderingly at the scene. He had heard here and there through space that such things had existed. He had reserved judgment for one could never tell what tale might next crawl through the vast spaces of the Empire. But the descriptions he had heard, probably because no man ever came back from the Crystal Mines unless he was high officer, had been gross underestimates.
Gedso Ion Brown was not of delicate constitution and he had been near too many battles to become shaky about anything. Further, nervousness was not part of his temperament. But he did not care to look at those things.
The spaceship was settling down to the charred landing field with its miserable cargo and Gedso Ion Brown turned back to his pinched cabin, one of the only two which had no leg irons included, to pack his slender belongings. A little later he shuffled down a gangway and put his trunk on the ground and looked about for someone to tell him where his quarters were. But there was no one interested in him and so he stood with his baggy uniform blowing about his ungainly body, feeling unwelcome and forlorn.
A mass gangway to his right, like a leg of a rusty beetle, was crowded with the sullen freight brought here each trip. Convicts, emaciated and ragged and chafed by irons, were being herded into trucks by surly and ruthless guards. He was not a prepossessing figure, Gedso Ion Brown. He was a full two meters tall and he weighed two and one-half times as much as another the same size for he had been born on Centaur One of Vega to pioneer Earth parents and Vega’s Centaur. One has a gravity two and one-half times that of Earth. A shuffling gait, a forward cant to his disproportioned head and thick, round shoulders minimized his appearance.
Life to him had always been a travail. At his Earth engineering school he had been dubbed a “provincial lout” and he had earned it for he crushed whatever chair he sat upon and in an unthinking moment might pull a door off its hinges if the catch held a second too long—and then stand looking stupidly and embarrassedly at the thing he held by the knob. Awkward and ungainly and shy, Gedso Ion Brown had never made much way in the Extra-Territorial Scienticorps, getting his promotion by number and so progressing alone and ignored in a service vast enough to swallow even his unhandsome bulk.
People generally thought him stupid, basing their conclusions upon his social disgraces, but this was not fair. In his fine Gedso was alert enough and it is doubtful if more than two or three men knew of that trick of his of glancing at a page and mentally photographing the whole of it. In such a way Gedso studied. In such a way did he hide his only shining light. He had two vices—apples and puzzles—and the only baggage he had placed in the freight room contained nothing else.
The arc cannon crackled with renewed ferocity and he looked away from the things he could see lumbering beyond the far wall. Convinced at last that his arrival was going unremarked, he tucked the heavy trunk under his arm and shuffled toward the P.C.
A trusty orderly jabbed his back with a juice wand. “You’re blocking the way.”
Gedso looked at the narrow, evil face.
“Would you please tell the commander that I would like to see him?”
“What’s your name? What do you want to see him about?” “My name is Brown. Gedso Ion Brown. I’m a technician in the E-T.S. I’ve been ordered here.”
The orderly looked startled and then weak. He nearly dropped his juice wand as he whipped to attention. “I … I am s-s-s-sorry, sir. The c-c-commander will be informed
immediately, s-s-s-sir.” He dived into the post and came skidding back to attention. “The commander will see you immediately, sir. I … I did not have any idea you were a technician, sir. I did not see your insignia, sir.”
Gedso said mildly, “Will you watch my trunk?” and went on inside.
The secretary, a convict soldier with the chevrons of master sergeant on his blouse, opened the door into an inner room.
Jules Drummond, captain general of the Administrative Department’s Extra-Territorial Command Corps, looked sourly up from the manifests of the newly arrived space vessel. He was a thin, dark gentleman, very tall and very military. There was a look of hawk cruelty about him, a look so common to E-T.C.C. commanders and intensified in General Drummond.
He looked for a full minute at Gedso and then said, “So you are a technician, are you?” With intentional rudeness he looked back at the manifest and left Gedso standing there. After a while he snapped, “Sit down.”
Gedso squirmed in discomfort and looked at the frail chairs. He pretended to ease into one, but held himself up from it. ‘“Where are your orders?” said Drummond.
Gedso fumbled through the baggy pockets of his tunic, found three apples and a core, but, much to his embarrassment, no orders. Faltering he said, “I guess—I must have packed them. I’ll get them.” He went out and got them from his trunk and brought them back.
Drummond again ordered him to sit down. It did not occur to Gedso to resent such treatment. He was only nominally under orders from General Drummond, for the Scienticorps was too important and too powerful to be ordered about by E-T.C.C. officers.
Acidly, Drummond threw the orders on the desk before him. “Two months ago I phoned for a technician. The fools! they know what the catalyzer from these mines is worth. They know how important it is that we work unhampered. Political fools, bungling the affairs of the Empire! They send me prisoners on their last leg with disease instead of workmen and artisans! They send me drunkards and worse for officers. I beg for a technician! A real technician to do something about this continual warfare! I tell them that day by day it grows worse and that it is only a question of time before all of us will be devoured alive!”
“I am a technician, sir,” ventured Gedso timidly. “I’d like to do what I can to help.”
Drummond seared him with a glare which took in the soiled and wrinkled slacks, the oversized tunic with its too-short sleeves.
“The final decadence of Empire,” said Drummond nastily.
Gedso seemed to miss the insult. “If you could get somebody to tell me what is wrong—”
“What would you do about it?” said Drummond. “I’ll send an engineer. Now get out of here!”
Gedso slipped as he rose from the chair and sat back with his full weight. It splintered to atoms under him and the whole post shook. Scarlet and confused, Gedso backed up through the door.
The orderly was a mental chameleon. When he dropped Gedso out of the passenger truck before the isolated little hut reserved for Extra-Territorial Scienticorps men in case they might come to inspect, the orderly did not offer to help Gedso with his trunk or even go so far as to hope that Gedso was comfortable. The orderly who, after the fashion of orderlies, had had an ear glued to the wall of Drummond’s office, hurried away to spread, after the fashion of orderlies, his commander’s opinion of the latest addition to the staff of the Crystal Mines.
That this was true was indicated by the attitude of the third-rank combat engineer who slouched up to the hut two hours later and found Gedso lying on the hard bunk eating an apple.
All his life, Blufore, the third-rank engineer, had heard tales of the technicians of the E-T.S., but only twice before today had he seen a technician first class in the flesh and not until today had he spoken to one of the “miracle men.” Glorified in song and story, in spacecast and rumor, E-T.S. technicians, “trouble shooters of our far-flung lifelines,” “magicians in khaki,” “test-tube godlings,” seemed to have a right to awe. There were twenty-seven thousand of them spread out amid a hundred and eighty-five trillion beings, things and men who held down the habitable spots of space, and a technician first class was, reputedly, never sent to duty unless everything was gone awry. Blufore had come ready to discard the flying rumors and bad opinions of this technician, for he knew that the technician’s presence was the Grand Council’s most scathing criticism of a military administrator.
Blufore saw the ungainly hulk of Gedso Ion Brown sprawled upon the bed. Blufore saw the apple and a core upon the floor. Blufore saw no test tubes or servant monsters. And when Blufore heard the mild, almost stuttering voice bid him, “Come in,” Blufore reacted as would any man experiencing the downfall of a god.
Gedso looked nearsightedly at Blufore as the man sat down. Gedso did not like the swaggering, boasting expression on Blufore’s face or the precision of Blufore’s fancifully cut uniform.
“I came to give you the data on this mess,” said Blufore. “But there’s nothing anybody can do which hasn’t already been done. I know because as a combat engineer I’ve tried every form of repelling force known without result on the ’things.’ Now what do you want to know?”
Gedso was not offended. He swung down his feet and cupped his chin and looked at Blufore. “Just what are these ‘things’?”
“Monsters, maybe. Living tanks. Some of them weigh a hundred and fifty tons, some three hundred. Some have a front that is all bone mouth. Some have eighty to a hundred and twenty legs. Some are transparent. Some are armor-plated. There have been as many as five thousand dead before the wall, making a wall of their own, and the others have kept right on coming. I suppose half a million of them have been killed by arc cannon in the past five or six years. Sometimes the push is so bad from the back that the dead are shoved like a shield right up to and through the wall and the things behind start grabbing soldiers. We lose about two hundred men a week.”
“How long has this present battle lasted?” said Gedso.
“Seventy-five years. Since the day the Terrestrial Exploration Command moved in here and found the crystals. First we fought them with ranked space tanks. Then with a force field. Then with fire guns. And now with arc cannon. They can be killed, yes. But that never stops them. Their attacks are in greater or lesser ferocity, but are spaced evenly over a period of time. Intense for an Earth week. Slack for an Earth week. Intense for an Earth week. Over and over. This is a slack period. They have broken through the wall just once, yesterday. They’ve been at this attack for seventy-five years.”
“You don’t know what they are, then?”
“Nobody knows and nobody ever will,” said Blufore.
“Is there anything else peculiar about this place?” asked Gedso.
“Peculiar! You must have seen it from the outside. You come through a wall of ink a thousand light-years long and high and three light-years thick. And inside the Black Nebula there are no stars or space as we know it, but gigantic shapes, dark and vague. And the space has force in it which heats a ship scorching hot and knocks it around like a cork in a dynamo. And you come in here through a tunnel to get to a chamber which is light but has no sun, where the most valuable catalyst ever found lies all over and even sticks from the ceiling. Peculiar! The mystery of this continued, seventy-five-year attack is nothing compared to the bigger mystery.”
Gedso said, “Are there any other tunnels leading out from this chamber?”
“I suppose there may be. It is too dangerous to scout. And there is no need to go beyond.”
“I see,” said Gedso.
“And within another month we will probably have to abandon this place,” said Blufore, in a lower tone. “The wall out there was high enough once. Now it isn’t. The arc cannon have less and less effect upon the ‘things.’ Each weapon has at first been adequate and then has become useless. And now there is no weapon to replace the arc cannon. Well have to abandon the Crystal Mines and the Empire can go to hell for its catalysts. And, between us, I can’t say as I
particularly care.”
“I see,” said Gedso, blinking his eyes like a sleepy pelican grown elephant size.
“That’s all I can tell you,” said Blufore.
“Thank you,” said Gedso.
Gedso put a couple of apples in his pocket and shuffled out into the gaseous light. He stood for a little while listening to the arc cannon crackle and blast and then moved slowly toward the wall, stepping off the road when cars and line trucks dashed by.
He climbed a stairway up to an observation post and hesitated near the top when he saw an army lieutenant and a signalman there.
“No visitors allowed,” snapped the lieutenant.
“Excuse me,” said Gedso and backed down.
He went to the outer wall and climbed to a command post there which he made certain was empty. He wiped his glasses and gazed through the dome out across the broken plain.
Somehow he could not get the “things” in focus at all and, for him, they moved as gigantic blurs, agleam with the savage light of exploding electricity from the arc cannon. The horde reached far, a moving, seemingly insensate sea, pushing forward into the glare of battle.
A convict private scuttled into the dome from the turret, beating out the flame which charred his tunic. He saw Gedso and started, but then saw no insignia and relaxed.
“Damn fuses. Six billion kilo-volts,” volunteered the private, gazing ruefully at his burned hands. He was a snub-nosed little fellow, slight of build, hard-boiled in a go-to-hell sort of way. He fixed a curious eye on Gedso. “What are you doin’ around here? You ain’t a tourist, are you?”
‘Well—” hesitated Gedso.
“Heard a party of tourists came here once. Thought it’d be fun. Two died of shock and the rest took the same ship back. Friend of somebody?”
“No,” said Gedso. “I guess not. You must have been around this place for a long while.”
Adventures in the Far Future Page 28
