The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “Oh, yes, certainly. What would you like to know?”

  Wesson smoked, leaning back reflectively, green eyes narrowed. “First,” he said, “read me the Pigeon report—you know, from the Brief History. I want to see if I remember it right.”

  “Chapter Two,” said the voice promptly. “First contact with a non-Solar intelligence was made by Commander Ralph C. Pigeon on July 1, 1987, during an emergency landing on Titan. The following is an excerpt from his official report:

  “ ‘While searching for a possible cause for our mental disturbance, we discovered what appeared to be a gigantic construction of metal on the far side of the ridge. Our distress grew stronger with the approach to this construction, which was polyhedral and approximately five times the length of the Cologne.

  “ ‘Some of those present expressed a wish to retire, but Lieutenant Acuff and myself had a strong sense of being called or summoned in some indefinable way. Although our uneasiness was not lessened, we therefore agreed to go forward and keep radio contact with the rest of the party while they returned to the ship.

  “ ‘We gained access to the alien construction by way of a large, irregular opening….The internal temperature was minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit; the atmosphere appeared to consist of methane and ammonia….Inside the second chamber, an alien creature was waiting for us. We felt the distress, which I have tried to describe, to a much greater degree than before, and also the sense of summoning or pleading….We observed that the creature was exuding a thick yellowish fluid from certain joints or pores in its surface. Though disgusted, I managed to collect a sample of this exudate, and it was later forwarded for analysis….’

  “The second contact was made ten years later by Commodore Crawford’s famous Titan Expedition—”

  “No, that’s enough,” said Wesson. “I just wanted the Pigeon quote.” He smoked, brooding. “It seems kind of chopped off, doesn’t it? Have you got a longer version in your memory banks anywhere?”

  There was a pause. “No,” said Aunt Jane.

  “There was more to it when I was a kid,” Wesson complained nervously. “I read that book when I was twelve, and I remember a long description of the alien—that is, I remember its being there.” He swung around. “Listen, Aunt Jane—you’re a sort of universal watchdog, that right? You’ve got cameras and mikes all over the station?”

  “Yes,” said the network, sounding—was it Wesson’s imagination?—faintly injured.

  “Well, what about Sector Two? You must have cameras up there, too, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then you can tell me. What do the aliens look like?”

  There was a definite pause. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that,” said Aunt Jane.

  “No,” said Wesson, “I didn’t think you could. You’ve got orders not to, I guess, for the same reason those history books have been cut since I was a kid. Now, what would the reason be? Have you got any idea, Aunt Jane?”

  There was another pause. “Yes,” the voice admitted.

  “Well?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t—”

  “—tell you that,” Wesson repeated along with it. “All right. At least we know where we stand.”

  “Yes, Sergeant. Would you like some dessert?”

  “No dessert. One other thing. What happens to station watchmen, like me, after their tour of duty?”

  “They are upgraded to Class Seven, students with unlimited leisure, and receive outright gifts of seven thousand stellors, plus free Class One housing….”

  “Yeah, I know all that,” said Wesson, licking his dry lips. “But here’s what I’m asking you. The ones you know—what kind of shape were they in when they left here?”

  “The usual human shape,” said the voice brightly. “Why do you ask, Sergeant?”

  Wesson made a discontented gesture. “Something I remember from a bull session at the academy. I can’t get it out of my head; I know it had something to do with the station. Just a part of a sentence: ‘…blind as a bat and white bristles all over…’ Now, would that be a description of the alien—or the watchman when they came to take him away?”

  Aunt Jane went into one of her heavy pauses. “All right, I’ll save you the trouble,” said Wesson. “You’re sorry, you can’t tell me that.”

  “I am sorry,” said the robot sincerely.

  As the slow days passed into weeks, Wesson grew aware of the station almost as a living thing. He could feel its resilient metal ribs enclosing him, lightly bearing his weight with its own as it swung. He could feel the waiting emptiness “up there,” and he sensed the alert electronic network that spread around him everywhere, watching and probing, trying to anticipate his needs.

  Aunt Jane was a model companion. She had a record library of thousands of hours of music; she had films to show him, and microprinted books that he could read on the scanner in the living room; or if he preferred, she would read to him. She controlled the station’s three telescopes, and on request would give him a view of Earth or the moon or Home….

  But there was no news. Aunt Jane would obligingly turn on the radio receiver if he asked her, but nothing except static came out. That was the thing that weighed most heavily on Wesson, as time passed—the knowledge that radio silence was being imposed on all ships in transit, on the orbital stations, and on the planet-to-space transmitters. It was an enormous, almost a crippling handicap. Some information could be transmitted over relatively short distances by photophone, but ordinarily the whole complex traffic of the space lanes depended on radio.

  But this coming alien contact was so delicate a thing that even a radio voice, out here where the Earth was only a tiny disk twice the size of the moon, might upset it. It was so precarious a thing, Wesson thought, that only one man could be allowed in the station while the alien was there, and to give that man the company that would keep him sane, they had to install an alpha network….

  “Aunt Jane?”

  The voice answered promptly, “Yes, Paul.”

  “This distress that the books talk about—you wouldn’t know what it is, would you?”

  “No, Paul.”

  “Because robot brains don’t feel it, right?”

  “Right, Paul.”

  “So tell me this—why do they need a man here at all? Why can’t they get along with just you?”

  A pause. “I don’t know, Paul.” The voice sounded faintly wistful. Were those gradations of tone really in it, Wesson wondered, or was his imagination supplying them?

  He got up from the living room couch and paced restlessly back and forth. “Let’s have a look at Earth,” he said. Obediently, the viewing screen on the console glowed into life: there was the blue Earth, swimming deep below him, in its first quarter, jewel bright. “Switch it off,” Wesson said.

  “A little music?” suggested the voice, and immediately began to play something soothing, full of woodwinds.

  “No,” said Wesson. The music stopped.

  Wesson’s hands were trembling; he had a caged and frustrated feeling.

  The fitted suit was in its locker beside the air lock. Wesson had been topside in it once or twice; there was nothing to see up there, just darkness and cold. But he had to get out of this squirrel cage. He took the suit down and began to get into it.

  “Paul,” said Aunt Jane anxiously, “are you feeling nervous?”

  “Yes,” he snarled.

  “Then don’t go into Sector Two,” said Aunt Jane.

  “Don’t tell me what to do, you hunk of tin!” said Wesson with sudden anger. He zipped up the front of his suit with a vicious motion.

  Aunt Jane was silent.

  Seething, Wesson finished his check-off and opened the lock door.

  The air lock, an upright tube barely large enough for one man, was the only passage between Sector One and Sector Two. It was also the only exit from Sector One; to get here in the first place, Wesson had had to enter the big lock at the “south” pole
of the sphere, and travel all the way down inside, by drop hole and catwalk. He had been drugged unconscious at the time, of course. When the time came, he would go out the same way; neither the maintenance rocket nor the tanker had any space, or time, to spare.

  At the “north” pole, opposite, there was a third air lock, this one so huge it could easily have held an interplanetary freighter. But that was nobody’s business—no human being’s.

  In the beam of Wesson’s helmet lamp, the enormous central cavity of the station was an inky gulf that sent back only remote, mocking glimmers of light. The near walls sparkled with hoarfrost. Sector Two was not yet pressurized; there was only a diffuse vapor that had leaked through the air seal and had long since frozen into the powdery deposit that lined the walls. The metal rang cold under his shod feet; the vast emptiness of the chamber was the more depressing because it was airless, unwarmed, and unlit. Alone, said his footsteps; alone…

  He was thirty yards up the catwalk when his anxiety suddenly grew stronger. Wesson stopped in spite of himself and turned clumsily, putting his back to the wall. The support of the solid wall was not enough. The catwalk seemed threatening to tilt underfoot, dropping him into the lightless gulf.

  Wesson recognized this drained feeling, this metallic taste at the back of his tongue. It was fear.

  The thought ticked through his head: They want me to be afraid. But why? Why now? Of what?

  Equally suddenly, he knew. The nameless pressure tightened, like a great fist closing, and Wesson had the appalling sense of something so huge that it had no limits at all, descending, with a terrible endless swift slowness….

  It was time.

  His first month was up.

  The alien was coming.

  As Wesson turned, gasping, the whole huge structure of the station around him seemed to dwindle to the size of an ordinary room—and Wesson with it, so that he seemed to himself like a tiny insect, frantically scuttling down the walls toward safety.

  Behind him as he ran, the station boomed.

  In the silent rooms, all the lights were burning dimly. Wesson lay still, looking at the ceiling. Up there his imagination formed a shifting, changing image of the alien—huge, shadowy, formlessly menacing.

  Sweat had gathered in globules on his brow. He stared, unable to look away.

  “That was why you didn’t want me to go topside, huh, Aunt Jane?” he said hoarsely.

  “Yes. The nervousness is the first sign. But you gave me a direct order, Paul.”

  “I know it,” he said vaguely, still staring fixedly at the ceiling. “A funny thing…Aunt Jane?”

  “Yes, Paul?”

  “You won’t tell me what it looks like, right?”

  “No, Paul.”

  “I don’t want to know. Lord, I don’t want to know….Funny thing, Aunt Jane, part of me is just pure funk—I’m so scared I’m nothing but a jelly.”

  “I know,” said the voice gently.

  “And part is real cool and calm, as if it didn’t matter. Crazy, the things you think about. You know?”

  “What things, Paul?”

  He tried to laugh. “I’m remembering a kids’ party I went to twenty, twenty-five years ago. I was—let’s see—I was nine. I remember, because that was the same year my father died.

  “We were living in Dallas then, in a rented mobile house, and there was a family in the next tract with a bunch of redheaded kids. They were always throwing parties; nobody liked them much, but everybody always went.”

  “Tell me about the party, Paul.”

  He shifted on the couch. “This one—this one was a Halloween party. I remember the girls had on black and orange dresses, and the boys mostly wore spirit costumes. I was about the youngest kid there, and I felt kind of out of place. Then all of a sudden one of the redheads jumps up in a skull mask, hollering, ‘C’mon, everybody get ready for hide-and-seek.’ And he grabs me, and says, ‘You be it,’ and before I can even move, he shoves me into a dark closet. And I hear that door lock behind me.”

  He moistened his lips. “And then—you know, in the darkness—I feel something hit my face. You know, cold and clammy, like—I don’t know—something dead….

  “I just hunched up on the floor of that closet, waiting for that thing to touch me again. You know? That thing, cold and kind of gritty, hanging up there. You know what it was? A cloth glove, full of ice and bran cereal. A joke. Boy, that was one joke I never forgot….Aunt Jane?”

  “Yes, Paul.”

  “Hey, I’ll bet you alpha networks make great psychs, huh? I could lie here and tell you anything, because you’re just a machine—right?”

  “Right, Paul,” said the network sorrowfully.

  “Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane…It’s no use kidding myself along. I can feel that thing up there, just a couple of yards away.”

  “I know you can, Paul.”

  “I can’t stand it, Aunt Jane.”

  “You can if you think you can, Paul.”

  He writhed on the couch. “It’s—it’s dirty, it’s clammy. My God, is it going to be like that for five months? I can’t, it’ll kill me, Aunt Jane!”

  There was another thunderous boom, echoing down through the structural members of the station. “What’s that?” Wesson gasped. “The other ship—casting off?”

  “Yes. Now he’s alone, just as you are.”

  “Not like me. He can’t be feeling what I’m feeling. Aunt Jane, you don’t know….”

  Up there, separated from him only by a few yards of metal, the alien’s enormous, monstrous body hung. It was that poised weight, as real as if he could touch it, that weighed down his chest.

  Wesson had been a space dweller for most of his adult life and knew even in his bones that, if an orbital station ever collapsed, the “under” part would not be crushed but would be hurled away by its own angular momentum. This was not the oppressiveness of planetside buildings, where the looming mass above you seemed always threatening to fall. This was something else, completely distinct, and impossible to argue away.

  It was the scent of danger, hanging unseen up there in the dark, waiting, cold and heavy. It was the recurrent nightmare of Wesson’s childhood—the bloated unreal shape, no-color, no-size, that kept on hideously falling toward his face….It was the dead puppy he had pulled out of the creek, that summer in Dakota—wet fur, limp head, cold, cold, cold….

  With an effort, Wesson rolled over on the couch and lifted himself to one elbow. The pressure was an insistent chill weight on his skull; the room seemed to dip and swing around him in slow, dizzy circles.

  Wesson felt his jaw muscles contorting with the strain as he knelt, then stood erect. His back and legs tightened; his mouth hung painfully open. He took one step, then another, timing them to hit the floor as it came upright.

  The right side of the console, the one that had been dark, was lighted. Pressure in Sector Two, according to the indicator, was about one and a third atmospheres. The air-lock indicator showed a slightly higher pressure of oxygen and argon; that was to keep any of the alien atmosphere from contaminating Sector One, but it also meant that the lock would no longer open from either side. Wesson found that irrationally comforting.

  “Lemme see Earth,” he gasped.

  The screen lighted up as he stared into it. “It’s a long way down,” he said. A long, long way down to the bottom of that well…He had spent ten featureless years as a servo tech in Home Station. Before that, he’d wanted to be a pilot, but had washed out the first year—couldn’t take the math. But he had never once thought of going back to Earth.

  Now, suddenly, after all these years, that tiny blue disk seemed infinitely desirable.

  “Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane, it’s beautiful,” he mumbled.

  Down there, he knew, it was spring; and in certain places, where the edge of darkness retreated, it was morning—a watery blue morning like the sea light caught in an agate, a morning with smoke and mist in it, a morning of stillness and promise. Down there, lost years
and miles away, some tiny dot of a woman was opening her microscopic door to listen to an atom’s song. Lost, lost, and packed away in cotton wool, like a specimen slide—one spring morning on Earth.

  Black miles above, so far that sixty Earths could have been piled one on another to make a pole for his perch, Wesson swung in his endless circle within a circle. Yet, vast as the gulf beneath him was, all this—Earth, moon, orbital stations, ships; yes, the sun and all the rest of his planets, too—was the merest sniff of space, to be pinched up between thumb and finger.

  Beyond—there was the true gulf. In that deep night, galaxies lay sprawled aglitter, piercing a distance that could only be named in a meaningless number, a cry of dismay: O…O…O…

  Crawling and fighting, blasting with energies too big for them, men had come as far as Jupiter. But if a man had been tall enough to lie with his boots toasting in the sun and his head freezing at Pluto, still he would have been too small for that overwhelming emptiness. Here, not at Pluto, was the outermost limit of man’s empire; here the Outside tunneled down to meet it, like the pinched waist of an hourglass; here, and only here, the two worlds came near enough to touch. Ours—and Theirs.

  Down at the bottom of the board, now, the golden dials were faintly alight, the needles trembling ever so little on their pins.

  Deep in the vats, the vats, the golden liquid was trickling down: “Though disgusted, I took a sample of the exudate, and it was forwarded for analysis….”

  Space-cold fluid, trickling down the bitter walls of the tubes, forming little pools in the cups of darkness; goldenly agleam there, half alive. The golden elixir. One drop of the concentrate would arrest aging for twenty years—keep your arteries soft, tonus good, eyes clear, hair pigmented, brain alert.

  That was what the tests of Pigeon’s sample had showed. That was the reason for the whole crazy history of the “alien trading post”—first a hut on Titan, then later, when people understood more about the problem, Stranger Station.

  Once every twenty years, an alien would come down out of Somewhere, and sit in the tiny cage we had made for him, and make us rich beyond our dreams—rich with life—and still we did not know why.