by Perry Rhodan
The ship was easily large enough for 10,000 people, but the sleepers, of whom there were 10 times as many, could be awakened only once landfall had been made on a suitable planet. The ship was too small for everyone.
The commander looked at the vidscreens.
Out there was space with its stars. Just a year ago, he had not even known what stars were. Suns, of course. But that they generally had planets. on which one could live and breathe...
A humming sound pulled him out of his musings.
"O-1 here, commander! I'm in the hyper-central. The navigation robots have worked over the data and
have given me the result along with the coordinates. It's all programmed. We can spring." The commander stood up and went to the control panel on the wall. He put his hand on the red switch. "I hope we haven't made an error, O-1..."
"We have done everything to avoid an error, commander."
"Very well." The commander held his breath. "What about the crew?"
"Everyone is at his post."
"Good." The commander didn't take the time to breathe out. "Now!" He pulled the switch down. It moved easily. Nothing seemed to change. But on the vidscreen the stars seemed to be wiped away by an invisible hand. For a fraction of a second there was nothing on the screen, then new patterns of stars formed into strange-looking constellations—and remained. In his neck the commander felt the pain of rematerialization. For some seconds the pain was connected with terrible fear but then as the pain slowly ebbed the fear that something had gone wrong also faded.
With one step C1 was at the intercom. "Hello, O-1! Do you hear me?" The video unit was activated. The first officer's face was marked by a haggard look but a first triumphant smile was already showing. "I believe—we've done it. Machines running normally. What does the vidscreen in the control room show?"
"New stars! The shift of some constellations shows that we've gone a distance that otherwise would have required decades. There's a white star close by. We're heading straight for it."
"The target star." The first officer mopped his brow. "You're right, C1! We've done it! Soon we'll be landing on a planet."
"Do you think that we can pilot the ship?"
"The robots will take care of that for us. They obey us. "Then have the new course calculated. I don't know how long it'll be before we reach the star."
"If we maintain our present speed, about three weeks."
"That's enough time," sighed C1 in relief. He did not suspect what the spring had caused...
• • •
Technician E-7, along with E-4, was conducting his daily inspection tour of the center of the spacesphere.
Just a year before, this part of the ship had been verboten. Only the robots were allowed entry. Any violation of the ban was punished by death—although a death was not actually death but eternal life. The condemned were taken to the freezing chambers and readied for suspended animation without knowing it. By that time the violators were already unconscious.
At the place where Repair Technician 75 had broken through was now a door. No robot stood guard there.
The two men entered the room beyond it.
The long rows of glass containers in which the bodies of sleepers had once lain were empty. Long before, the frozen men and women had been brought into the storage chamber where they would stay until the ship had reached its destination.
E-7 stopped when he heard footsteps.
Here below, there was nothing for anyone to look for. The former surveillance robots had been withdrawn because they were needed for work elsewhere.
He breathed more easily when he recognized the medic. "Hello, M-3! On inspection?"
The medic walked up to the two men and stopped in front of them. "As I am daily. And you?"
"As we are daily, too. This part of the ship is in our section. But—in a little while, we'll be able to leave the ship. It's incomprehensible—leaving the ship!"
The medic nodded and looked around as though he had heard something. Then he shook his head puzzledly and said: "I'm hearing ghosts. Ever since we made the hyperjump three days ago, nothing's been right down here—as if it's haunted." He glanced at the long rows of glass coffins. I just thought I saw a shadow back there along the partition wall leading to the freezer. I sent a robot to investigate. He did not return."
E-7 had gone deathly pale. "He didn't come back? What does that mean...?"
"Like I said, he went through the hatch into the room where the sleepers are resting—and didn't come back. The hatch closed automatically."
"The robot stayed...in there?"
The medic nodded. He was still listening intently but all was silent behind the rows of glass containers. The somewhat murky liquid in which the presumed dead had floated stood motionless within the containers.
"Why hasn't the commander been informed?" asked E-4 fearfully. "Perhaps...?" He suddenly stopped, as though afraid to voice his apprehension.
The medic did not look at him. "What do you mean... perhaps?" Over behind the long row of glass containers was a noise. Then a shadow emerged from the gloom and approached them.
When it stood before them, they realized what it was. It was a naked man.
• • •
With the first breath of returning life, he felt cold—icy, unimaginable cold.
He emerged from a night that had never known light, a night that must have endured for an eternity in the past and had no morning. But now morning had dawned. He tried to move his limbs but without success. They seemed to be surrounded by an invisible armor that radiated an icy coldness. His feet, however, were free. When he tried to feel with them, he found that they met no resistance.
Then his memory returned. The emigrants' ship had taken off and begun the great flight. But it had happened even before the first hyperjump. The robots had overpowered them and continued the originally planned undertaking. Operation Regeneration, it had been called when it started. The living witnesses of the past were to live again in the distant future. The Imperator's advisers had an idea how necessary the realm would someday find the fresh blood of undegenerate nobility.
The robots...? The awakened man felt terror. Everything had gone wrong. He had awakened too soon. Or too late? His name suddenly occurred to him again. He was Alos, the Cyberneticist, responsible for the functioning of the robots on the huge ship. And then the robots had overpowered him just like they had all the other ship's passengers. Why had they awakened him now?
He suddenly felt wetness. The ice was melting somewhere and becoming water. Then he noticed that he was naked.
It was only with difficulty that he could move now but only in one direction. Feet first, he slid out of the tiny container. For endless seconds he hung over an abyss whose depth he could not measure. Then his cold fingers could hold him no more. He let go and fell.
He fell less than a meter to the floor.
At the same moment, lights on the ceiling flamed on.
Blinded, Alos closed his eyes, eyes that had not seen fight in thousands of years. Only slowly he opened them again. Gradually the nerve fibers began to function again, relaying the received impressions on to his brain.
Alos began to see.
Thousands upon thousands of men and women lay stacked in the room. They lay in long rows, one on top of the other, separated only by the icy walls of the honeycomb in which they rested. Preserved in such a manner, they could endure for thousands of years if the temperature remained constant.
He had laid in the third row from the bottom, precisely on the central corridor. Beneath his place were two more ice-blocks in which two motionless men rested as though dead.
Motionless?
The lower one moved. The feet stretched and pushed away the half-melted ice-cover. It fell to the floor and broke into a thousand pieces.
For a moment Alos forgot the incident. Twinges of stabbing pain wandered through his limbs, in which life was gradually returning. The blood prickled in his veins. But he knew that the reviv
al process must have been in operation for hours. The pain was not serious and therefore meaningless.
Now the other Arkonide was moving too. As he kicked away the floor plate, the other made his way into the open, where he was greeted by Alos.
"Commodore Ceshal... you?"
The newly awakened man looked at Ales carefully, as if he were seeing him for the first time. Then he shook his head. "The robots must have realized that they were acting wrongly. They've reawakened us. They probably can't get along without us."
Alos realized that the commander had not yet grasped the whole truth. It would be a shock for him.
"Commodore Ceshal—how long have we slept? How long does it feel like to you?"
"Going by how I feel? I'd stay about an hour. But the robots would certainly need time to freeze us and stack us up. Anyway..."
He stopped suddenly. He had looked around while he was talking. The light was burning brightly now, shining on the long rows of frozen people stacked up to the vaulting ceiling. It was not necessary to count them. With one look Ceshal realized that there were 10 or 20 times as many people here as there were aboard the ship when it took off.
"On every long hour, Ceshal," Alos murmured bitterly.
"By the Imperium!" the commodore gasped. "What happened?"
In the meantime, the third man had been able to free himself from his block of ice. It was the scientist Ekral who now stood up and took in with widely opened eyes the unbelievable sight. His crystal-clear logic began to operate with precision almost at once. His voice was strangely husky as he finally summed up.
"Thousands of years must have gone by! The robots have done exactly what we planned. Only they did it in a way appropriate to their mentality. I can remember them pushing me into the converter—then I was dead. And now—many generations resting in an icy grave. But to what purpose? Why?"
"We'll find out," Ceshal told him reassuringly. "Anyway, they've activated the waking mechanism now. We must have come to a planet. Perhaps they succeeded in repairing the defective hyperdrive. Didn't the hypercom break down after the explosion?"
Alos nodded slowly. "My memory is muddy and I no longer recall exactly what happened." He stepped to one side as two more Arkonides slid out of their ice coffins and helped a third to his feet. "It's going to get crowded in here if more awake."
"The machinery probably thawed everyone simultaneously," said Ceshal in a choked voice. "We've got to get to the exit. The evacuation of the ship must proceed in an orderly fashion or we'll have a catastrophe on our hands."
The three men hurried down the corridor past the reawakened people and finally reached the end of it. A wall covered with crystals of ice marked the termination of the corridor. An iron wheel, such as are found on bank-vault doors on Earth, showed where the exit was but the wheel could not be moved.
"Locked!" cried Ceshal. "Of course—what else! The deep-freeze chamber can be opened only from outside. We'll have to wait until somebody lets us out."
"Who's this 'somebody'?" asked Ales with an ominous undertone in his voice. "The robots?"
"We can't wait much longer," Ekral observed, pointing to all the awakening sleepers. "If they all wake up now..."
The prospect was horrifying.
Wild with desperation, Ceshal shook at the door wheel but it did not move a millimeter. Meanwhile, the water from the melting ice flowed in little streams to the center of the spherical room and collected there. But it did not rise. It sank gurgling into the depths, soaked up by some unknown mechanism that had been called into mysterious life none too soon—but also, none too late.
At least they would not drown.
Thirty or 40 men pushed their way through the corridor and surrounded Commodore Ceshal, Ekral and Alos. Others followed them. The air was already getting worse. The lights burned brightly down from the ceiling and made the room hotter. Somewhere a woman's scream echoed.
"We've got to get out of here!" someone cried, balling his fists. "If all of them wake up..."
The rest went unsaid but the thought alone was horrifying enough. One hundred thousand people in this small room. Prone and surrounded by thin walls of ice, they'd had room enough. But the ice was melting and they were awakening. They needed air to breathe, a place to stand...
Ceshal shook again at the door-wheel. "They've awakened us, men," he said, trying to give his voice a ring of authority, "so they'll let us out of our confinement soon enough. Perhaps the landing isn't completed yet."
In the background the woman's voice was still screaming. Someone was trying to assure her that her husband was not dead but had yet to awake. And her child...
Her child would be a man himself, perhaps older than she.
Commodore Ceshal suddenly froze. The wheel had trembled slightly under his hands, then turned a few centimeters.
He raised both his arms and asked for quiet.
The wheel turned some more. A tiny crack opened in the impenetrable wall. It was dark outside. A figure came into the room and stopped.
Ceshal acted completely by instinct.
He threw up his hand and turned the wheel in the opposite direction. The door closed again. When the
intruder turned around it was too late.
Ceshal stared into the robot's expressionless face. "What has happened outside in the ship?" he asked. "Answer me!"
He actually expected no answer at all, since the last time he had seen a robot it had been master of the ship. But to his astonishment this particular robot showed obedience.
"The hyperspring must have activated the waking mechanism, master. This was not anticipated."
'Master', the robot had said. Ceshal registered the fact with perceptible relief. Had the robots changed
their minds—now that it was too late?
"Hyperspring? The mechanism is functioning again?"
"It was never defective, master."
Ceshal stared at the robot. "What?"
"I know only that it was never defective, master. My memory was partly erased and that is why I know no more than that. I was directed to come into this room to investigate a noise that was heard outside. Let me go back so I can report what has happened."
"Report to whom?"
And then the robot began to explain...
• • •
Commodore Ceshal fearlessly opened the deep-freeze hatch door and went out to the three men, who upon seeing him all but froze with terror.
"Well?" he said into the deathly silence that followed. "Now that you've awakened us, see to it that we receive clothing. We've been cold ever since the blood began to flow in our veins again. You've broken the mastery of the robots; now solve this problem too."
M-3 was the first to recover from the shock. "Who has awakened—how many are awake?"
"Everyone—I hope. We don't know how reliable the mechanism is. Ekral and Tunuter built it together and were responsible."
The medic had gone pale. "Everyone? It'll take us three weeks to reach the planet. From where are we to get the clothing? Go back into the sleep chamber and calm your people. There isn't enough room in the ship..."
"You're crazy!" said Ceshal coldly. "There are more than 100,000 of us, Arkonide men and women, crammed together in the least possible space. We need clothing and nourishment. Besides, I am the true commander of this ship."
M-3 foresaw the imminent developments with a clarity that was uncanny even to him. If only he could at least inform C1 of the danger without exciting the suspicion of the reawakened man. "Of course your rank will be respected," he said cautiously, "but I am not empowered to make any decisions. I'm only one of the physicians on board. I've been bearing responsibility ever since the robots were reprogrammed. Before that—it's a very long story, which I believe will make sense when combined with your story. Come with us, if you please. We'll introduce you to the commander. He's in the control room."
Ceshal looked at M-3 questioningly. "You can't lie to me, Doctor. I was born thousands of years before yo
u and belong to the ruling class of the Imperium.
"What Imperium?" demanded M-3.
Ceshal began to realize the forgetfulness that had settled over the descendants. The robots had seen to that. They must have had plans of their own as to the available human material. But what sort of plans...?
"We are Arkonides, rulers of a stellar empire on an unimaginable scale. There was an experiment we were supposed to carry out but it went wrong—or perhaps not. My memory fails me. There must be indications of some kind in the control room if the robots haven't destroyed them. Well, Doctor, take me to the commander."
The change in intentions came so suddenly that M-3 was surprised. He went to a wall cabinet and searched through it until he found a blanket that he handed to Ceshal.
"Let's go. I think we don't have a minute to lose if we want to avoid a disaster. You stay here, E-4 and E-7. Make sure that no one else leaves the freezer." He hesitated for a moment, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small needle-beamer. "Under no circumstances is anyone to come out."
Ceshal wanted to say something but then he was silent and wrapped himself in the blanket. He did not look very impressive and began to realize the psychological effect of a well-fitting uniform. The medic motioned to him and walked ahead. Silently he followed. Before he bent to go out the connecting hatchway, he looked back one last time.
The two technicians had gone to the freezer hatch and taken their positions. Their faces showed grim determination.
Ceshal suspected that the difficulties were just beginning...
• • •
The commander displayed excellent self-control.
When M-3 entered the control room with the awakened Arkonide, he had just received from O-1 the not very reassuring news that the engineers had discovered considerable change in the machine room. The hyperspring must have caused some short circuits. The energy storage units had discharged without any reason and no one knew what had used the energy. There could be no doubt that the transition mechanism was no longer operable.
