Space Service

by Andre Norton

  He walked to the landing cradle as tugs appeared overhead holding the Maiston in the grip of unyielding tractors. In the bluish Earth-set the vast, insensate freighter was ominously menacing. Dave looked up at its corroded, curving sides and could not help but shudder at the thought of the grisly things he would find in its black interior.

  The steri-crew was wheeling up vortex guns, tractor banks, flame generators, acid lines and the tools necessary to make entrance to a derelict. Dave was aware a hush had settled over the crowd. The thin, distant murmur of noise from a thousand communicators had become a portentous silence now.

  They were waiting with avid interest for that breathless moment when he opened the locks and entered the ship. They could hardly wait to hear what he would say about his findings. He knew some of them were growling impatiently at his cautious preparations, grumbling at his exterior inspection.

  The chief rolled up the portable bacterial wagon. Dave stood still as the medical kit’s tractors and repellers were balanced, brought to focus on his back. He took a few steps to test its drag. “Lighten it by fifty kilos,” he directed. “I might have to climb and, chief, set the automatic neutral so I can step around and back without unfocusing. I don’t want to chase the thing over the lunarscape to find a test tube.”

  He walked slowly up the ramp, moved along the blackened, rusted keel. In some distant past the ship had rested on a planet’s earthy surface; frozen earth cracked off at his touch.

  Instantly he melted the dirt with a hand torch. A crumb of dust, loaded with an unknown virus, could settle in a joint of his metal shoes, infect the station. He took tweezers, teased off a few clumps, put them in solution, centrifuged, read the organic indicator on the bacterioscope, sighed with relief. The stuff was sterile. The actinic power of solar radiation had killed any organisms clinging to the ship. He took a larger sample for the geologists, turned to the landing room.

  He took hold of the recessed handle, turned and pulled. The door was frozen closed. “Set up a vortex, center it on the door, pull the door and as the air explodes out turn to full temp.”

  He stepped back, turned on his suit to full reflection so as to avoid external heating. The crew aimed their whirling flames at the door, tractors penciled at the handle, the door tore open with a grinding vibration, felt even through his cushioned shoes. Air expanded out, was caught in the whirling vortex, heated instantly to its ultimate limit.

  Dave stood on the deck of the entrance lock. He flashed his light on the rusting bulkheads, on winches oxidized by time, on armor, long since obsolete. He looked at the ship’s design on the wall, studied the passages, corridors, location of offices and holds. He went back out, picked up a power cable, plugged it into the ship’s emergency line. The ammeter showed a tremendous drain, but no lights flashed in the compartment, nor did his own circuits break with overload.

  He pushed the handle of the winch to see if he had power there, but the handle crumbled to flaky dust in his grip. He took a scalpel from his mobile kit, scraped at the door and the metal cracked and peeled with brittle weakness. “The interior metal is about as strong as tin foil.” He made the announcement surprised at his own calmness. “Call for the consulting metallurgists.”

  He found the automatic log, the device which recorded all the captain’s orders, messages and directives to his crew, unfastened it from its niche, dropped it in a sterilizing bath, handed it out to Thurman. “I noticed their last entry was they were leaving the Cepheus nucleus. That’s a hard white area, so we can expect a most virulent type of organism. Flame before opening.”

  “Are you really going inship?” Thurman asked anxiously.

  “I must, it is orders.”

  He pushed on the door leading inship and the panel crashed inwards. The metal had the tensile strength of decayed wood.

  Curiosity had not erased his natural fear or conquered his vague apprehension.

  As he walked gingerly up the long corridor he had the spine-tingling sensation that someone was watching him and that at any moment one of the panels would slide back and someone would step out and ask what he was doing in their ship.

  “I feel crazy,” he said aloud.

  “You all right, sir?” It was Thurman’s voice, it sounded faint, alarmingly faint.

  He shivered with expectation as he rounded the corridor and started up the ramp towards the fifth deck. He felt the tug of the kit behind him suddenly slacken and he whirled abruptly to see his mobile unit careening madly back down the ramp. It hit the bulkhead, crashed through its friable metal, vanished into the cave it created.

  At the same instant he was aware that his light was growing steadily dimmer and the air in his suit was stifling. He looked at the instruments on his left wrist. He could feel the pulsating throb of laboring motors in his shoes. They were pulling current, acting as though they were being shorted out.

  That was what had happened to his kit. The tubes had blown from an unexpected surge. Every instinct told him he should go back and tell the Director General of the Public Health Service to shove his activity into deepest space and keep it there. The discipline that came from years of training was greater than instinctual protective mental mechanisms.

  He stopped in the center of the corridor to adjust his air machine. He turned off his laboring motors and set the emergency bellows in his suit’s flanks. As long as he walked they would circulate air, but he couldn’t stand still.

  Then his lights went out.

  He stopped, petrified with fearful, startled surprise. He started gropingly to retrace his steps, trying to remember each turn he had made when he became conscious that the bulkheads, the overhead, even the deck were emitting a faint golden glow and as his eyes became dark-adapted he discovered that he could see perfectly well. He forced himself to continue up the ramp and through the corridors.

  He came to it!

  The panel he dreaded, hoped to reach. The entrance to the crew’s quarters.

  He pushed through the friable panel. Stopped! Abruptly!

  Sweat oozed from his brow, dripped down his back. Sweat formed on the palms of his hands, made them damp in their sheathed gloves. Nausea gripped him. The crew, all of them, were here!

  They weren’t the macabre, decayed sight he had expected to find, actually hoped to find. They laid in their plastic bunks and their unclothed bodies were semitransparent and they glowed with a lambent flickering radiance. Their features were vaguely discernible. He experienced the eerie sensation they were turning their heads, observing his every action.

  He forced himself to the side of the bunk. Pushed out his sheathed hand, touched one of the things. Instantly he felt a shock. A shock as though an intense surge of pure energy had leaped through his entire organism and stultified his brain. It was painful in its intensity, exquisitely pleasant in its cortical suggestion.

  But the touch itself had done something of unutterable wonder to the body.

  The light playing through the human remains flickered violently, vibrated with intense nervous energy as though his touch had disturbed a primal balance. Then, the body vanished in a flash of coruscating fire and a tiny ball of flame, almost microscopic in size, burned on the plastic bed frame.

  He touched another body, watched it coalesce into condensed living energy, felt the same orgiastic sensation ripple through his brain. He started to laugh, was aware that he was laughing, looked at his hand, giggling at the flame which leaped from the metal sheathing his fingers.

  “The ultimate bacterial form; the pure electric protein. I’ve found it,” he shouted. “Bacteria of pure energy.” He jumped up and down, clapping his hands in joyous abandon at the concept of his thought, distantly aware of his euphoric insanity. He knew, too, that what he had found was a long-anticipated discovery.

  It was a mathematical certainty it would be found. The medical physicists had expected to find such a life form as soon as they realized the verity of atomic energy. A life principle that by-passed the usual organic methods o
f existence, took their energy, without clumsy digestion, absorption, detoxification and evacuation, directly from the primal source. It was the ultimate of bacterial evolution.

  He knew in the deep wells of his mind that his actions now were a result of short circuits in the thalamic synapses, that the pyramidal cells of his cortex were being subjected to an intense radiation. Just as it had drained the current from his motors, shorted out the intricate hookups in his medical kit, it was even now destroying the delicate fabric of his mind.

  The living neutrons of coalescing flame whirling in semiorganic patterns were absorbing the energy pouring into the ship. They were multiplying in number, growing in strength. They would ooze forth through the metal their activity had decayed, fall on the landing platform and there, subjected to the intense solar radiation, they would utterly destroy his station and all that it meant.

  Through the cloying mist forming through his mind the basic pattern of normal conduct was still able to assert itself. He remembered the public!

  Dave stared down incredulously at the lambent flame eroding the fresh metal of his armored hands. He experienced a rising fury that a sentient bacterium should so fog his mind. Thalamic rage, instinctive rather than intuitive, surged through him.

  He pulled the steri-gun from its sheath, pointed its needle muzzle at the deck, squeezed the grip. Livid flame struck the deck, splashed about his feet, tore through the friable metal, volatilized girders weakened by disease, tore through the next deck, fountained on the one beneath that, burned out through the ship to volcano on the metal landing platform, in a burst of energy that lit up the lunarscape.

  He looked down through the gaping hole, turned his tortured vision to the flaming erosion of his hand. Slowly, deliberately, as though he were drunk and had to carefully reason out each motion, he transferred the gun, pointed it at the infected arm and convulsively fisted the hilt.

  There was a long, long moment of unbearable pain, of agony so great it taxed his wavering sanity to experience the tremendous burst of impulses bombarding his mind. The dark curtain of shock was shrouding his brain as he leaped into the hole he had blasted.

  He opened his eyes into instant, alert consciousness. He turned his head, integrating himself with his surroundings. Dr. Nissen with a corps of nurses were watching him with that professional detachment which comes from years of practice. Nissen slowly came over to his bed, withdrew an infusion needle from his leg.

  Then he experienced the impact of memory. He raised his arms, looked down at the right hand. He had not expected it to be there, was actually surprised to see it. He flexed the fingers, rubbed their tips across the coverings of the bed.

  He knew then it was a cleverly grafted prosthesis, as good, well almost as good, as his own arm and hand had been.

  “How long?” He was surprised at the timbre of his voice.

  “Three weeks,” Nissen replied. “We did the surgery at once; kept you out until we were sure the grafts took.”

  “Grafts?”

  “You burned your feet off with your steri-pistol.”

  “Oh—”

  Nissen sat on the edge of the bed. “We got a classification on the stuff. It’s an organism, lives by synergism, derives energy of existence direct from photonic energy. It’ll live and multiply on anything with a metallic or electrical structure.”

  “What did you do with the ship?”

  “We sent it into the sun. You made quite a name for yourself. Hero, you know, trying to destroy yourself for humanity. Nordheimer even sent you flowers. Blackbern sent you a skin. Sorry about your feet, but you know. It’s for the public.”

  “Yes,” Dave said slowly, feeling the awkward heaviness of his prosthetic extremities. “I know. It’s for the public.”

  Unfortunately there can be something new under the sun—when that sun is not Sol.

  8 GALACTIC SCIENTIFIC EXPLORER: Robert Edwards

  Unfortunately there can be something

  new under the sun—when that sun is not Sol.

  As Dr. Robert Edwards was forced to admit when Expedition II

  sat down on the planet Minotaur.

  To solve the problem of the man who turned blue

  became very important indeed.

  Expedition Polychrome

  BY J.A. WINTER, M.D.

  “No, Tom, you’re making the mistake so many others do.” Dr. Edwards smiled; he was very happy to have the chance to launch a discourse on his favorite theme. “There can’t be any new diseases. You see, the human organism is capable of acting in only certain ways. For example, the blood pressure can go up, it can come down or it can remain the same. The temperature can be elevated, it can be subnormal or it can be normal. And so it goes for every function of the body—it can change only within the limits of its own capacity to function.”

  No doubt about it—Edwards was feeling quite pleased with himself. And it was well deserved. The medical expedition under his direction to the planet Minotaur had just solved a most unusual problem involving the death of all members of Expedition I.

  He tilted back in his chair in the control room and continued. “When we study exotic diseases the difficulty, therefore, is to find the causative agent. The disease itself is probably greatly similar to one with which we have been familiar on Earth for hundreds of years.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Tom. “The roads it may travel on might be new, but it’s still the same old model that’s doing the traveling.”

  “Exactly,” replied Bob. “To give you another example: the body is capable of only certain color changes. The skin might turn brown, due to the presence of melanin, one of the normally found pigments. Or it might turn any one of the colors seen in the degradation of hemoglobin. You know, those fascinating hues which change from dark blue to green to yellow, which we all saw adorning your left eye last year.

  “No,” he continued, without giving Tom a chance to explain how he got that shiner, “we could never expect to see a man turn, say, an aquamarine blue. There just isn’t a precursor for that color in the body. So we’ll never see an exotic disease where the skin is aquamarine or we’ll never see a disease where a man reacts outside of the normal limitations of response.”

  “So that’s it,” mused Tom. “Yes, what is it?” He turned around as a knock came at the door.

  It was one of the crew members. “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but I’d like to have Dr. Edwards take a look at me. My skin is kind of a funny color.”

  Edwards turned around. Like the Bay of Naples on a sunny day, or Lake Superior in July, the man’s skin was a beautiful vivid aquamarine blue.

  Bob’s jaw dropped. He had just said that such a color couldn’t possibly occur, yet here it was! Tom couldn’t help smiling at Bob’s obvious discomfiture. “Dr. Edwards,” he asked archly, “wouldn’t you say that Slawson’s skin is aquamarine blue?”

  “Yes,” answered Bob—and you could see he hated to admit it—“I guess you could call it that.”

  “My, my,” said Tom, “I didn’t realize that ‘never’ was such a short time!”

  Bob wasn’t annoyed by Tom’s sly digs—he deserved them; but he was immediately preoccupied with the medical problem which had just slapped him in his distinguished face. He pondered for a few minutes, meanwhile making little smacking sounds with his lips. Finally he reached over and flipped on the switch of the intraship communication system.

  “Schultz—come up to the radio room as fast as you can get here.”

  “Yes, sire,” replied Schultz, with his usual exaggerated pseudo-deference.

  While waiting for Schultz, Bob turned to the crewman, standing there patiently. “How do you feel, Slawson?”

  “Not too bad, sir,” he replied; you could see that he wasn’t going to dramatize his illness. “I noticed that I was a little short of breath when I walked up, but outside of that I’m O.K.”

  Dr. Wilhelm Schultz then dashed in. He checked any questions he might have had at a signal from Edwards, who continued hi
s questioning.

  “When did you first notice that your skin was this color?”

  “Just a few minutes ago. Just after I got back in the ship.”

  Three pairs of eyebrows were immediately elevated; could Minotaur be dangerous, in spite of the negative laboratory tests?

  “Oh, you were outside?” asked Bob, mildly. He wasn’t going to let his anxiety to get the facts influence the judicious manner of getting a history.

  “Yes, sir,” answered Slawson. “When we got the word that we could go outside, that it was all clear, I just went out and walked around the ship. I . . . I hope that was all right, sir,” he added apologetically.

  “That was all right, Slawson,” Bob replied. “But it looks as if we doctors were all wrong. What do you think about this, Schultzie?”

  “It looks pretty obvious that he got his bee-ootiful pigmentation from outside, all right. Going to take precautions?”

  “You’re right, Dutchman. Kelly, please order that the ship be sealed, immediately.” Bob waited a moment until Tom had finished snapping his brisk, crisp orders into the intercom mike. “Then you’d better have all the circulating air in the ship triple-filtered; use the emergency bank of precipitrons, too.”

  “All right, Bob,” assented Tom, as he stood up. “But what was that you were saying about it being impossible for a man to turn blue? Boy, are you going to have some explaining to do!”

  “Get out of here,” grinned Bob. “Go take care of your tin can.”

  When Tom left, Bob, immediately got back to business. “Sit down, Slawson, and let’s go into this a little further. What did you do when you left the ship? Try to remember everything—no matter how trivial.”

  Slawson sat down; he leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees, knitting his brows in concentration. “Let’s see, now. I was all by myself—I was the only one off duty at the time. I went out through the air lock, closing the inner door after me and leaving the outer door open. I took a few steps so I was out of the shadow of the ship and just looked around. I remember thinking how good it was to see the sun . . . the suns, I mean . . . after that storm we had.” He broke off his narrative momentarily, to ask, “Is that the sort of stuff you want to hear, sir?”