Jan Van Tyren, browsing listlessly among these wonders of another solar system, obtained his first direct hint of what the owners of the ship had been like. Sinuous patches of gray ash, contorted so as to still portray the agonies of death, sprawled here and there on the floor. Brown flakes, resembling bits of parchment, were mixed with the ash—the remnant, probably, of chitinous exoskeletons.
The crew of the derelict had been slain. The pitted plating of the floor around the remains of each of their bodies, showed that clearly. Something hot and corrosive had blasted them out of existence. They had battled valiantly, but they had been overcome.
Jan saw a silvery object lying beside one of the areas of ash. He picked it up. A mummified fragment of flesh, suggestive of the foot of a bird, clung to it, its three prehensile toes curved fiercely around the grip and trigger button of the small weapon.
Yes, those unknowns had fought as men would do; but they had failed. Van Tyren’s set face exhibited a fleeting sneer as he hurled the object aside.
He went on with his explorations. The dust of remote mortality swirled up in the path of his careless feet, filling the Sunbeams from the windows with eddying motes. There was air here to support the motes; but whether it was breathable after the passage of ages seemed hardly probable.
Jan paused before a switchboard. His gauntleted hand fumbled hesitantly over a dial at its center. He turned the dial to the right. A faint vibration was transmitted to his fingers. He turned the dial more, not knowing that his act was perhaps altering a detail in the normal course of destiny. The vibration increased. He stood back, waiting.
Beneath the framework mounting of the switchboard was a cabinet of smooth, tawny material. The front of it opened now, revealing a darkened interior. From the opening a slender head was thrust, swaying with rhythmic cadence from side to side. It had a single eye, as expressionless as the lens of a camera, which in truth the orb seemed to be.
There was no mouth in evidence, nor any need of one; for this thing, though it presented characteristics commonly associated with living creatures, yet was marked with the unmistakable stamp of the machine. The triangular head had the purple gloss of the other metallic objects in the room. The intricate appendages which projected around its throat, forming a sort of frilled collar, were of the same substance. Beneath them the slender length of the thing was revealed as it crept in serpentine fashion from the cabinet. Its body was composed of thousands of glistening segments, as minutely tooled as the parts of a watch.
The monster was in full view now, its head raised to the level of Jan’s eyes. Instinctively he had backed away, though somehow the idea of danger did not occur to him. Perhaps he had left normal caution behind him on Ganymede.
For a time, nothing more happened. The triangular head continued to sway from side to side, but that was all. Van Tyren stood statuesquely, his feet spread wide apart in bullish defiance directed not so much against this amazing fabrication as against his own aching memories. Even the tangible truth of this fantastic episode could not wholly smother the agony of the recent past.
Presently the serpentine robot turned and glided off among the surrounding maze of machines. With a grace that was at once beautiful and abhorrent it writhed its way to an apparatus at the center of the room. Its glittering appendages touched controls skillfully.
A BLAST of air surged from vents high up on the walls. Jan felt the thrust of it against his armor, and saw the ashes of the derelict’s dead crew go swirling away into other vents along with the lifeless vapor that had been sealed for so many eons in this tomb of space.
In response to some further manipulation of dials and switches on the part of the robot, a light, restful blue began to burn in a crystal tube above Jan’s head. He looked up at it and it seemed to exert a soothing, hypnotic influence upon him. He did not even protest when the unknown that he had freed returned to his side and made a gentle attempt to remove his space armor. His own fingers closed on the fastenings and helped those delicate metallic members to complete the task.
Free of the cumbersome attire, he stood eagerly in those cool, blue rays. They appeared to probe to every corner of his being, drawing all the ache and tension out of his tortured nerves.
The grief in his mind blurred to a diffused sweetness. At first he was almost terrified. It was sacrilege to let the thought of his wife and son fade away from him so. Then, no longer wishing to think, he surrendered completely to the healing, Lethean influence of the rays.
The air around him now was cold and refreshing. He sucked in great lungfuls of it. He flexed his muscles indolently, and at last his rugged face broke into a smile. Somewhere music whispered—exotic music out of a time and region too distant to fathom.
The automaton was gliding here and there with no sound except a soft, slithering jingle. It was putting things in order, inspecting and readjusting this device and that. Jan wondered how many thousands of millenniums had gone by since any of those machines had been called upon to function. He wondered too at the unfathomable kindness of his queer host, and whether it had read his mind, learning of the pain that had crushed him.
But the rays made him inclined rather to accept than to question, and for a while he did not pursue his ideas further. He was in no hurry. He had not a care or responsibility in the universe. There was plenty of time for everything.
After perhaps an hour under the tube of the blue light, Jan Van Tyren realized that he was hungry. Little food had passed his lips since the quick departure from Ganymede. He put on his space suit again, descended through the airlock by which he had entered this chamber and shinned down the spirally fluted pillar. Before he had reached the bottom the robot was descending above him, its flexible, snake-like body sliding easily in the spiral grooves. The thing had deserted its tasks to follow him.
JAN proceeded to gather certain food articles from the store of concentrated rations aboard his space boat. But before he had collected what he wanted, the automaton was beside him, trying to help. Jan attempted to shove those gleaming claws away, but they were persistent; and finally, in a mood to accept the gentle suggestion, he capitulated, allowing the robot to take several containers from him.
“I think I know what you are.” Jan chuckled inside his oxygen helmet. “You were made to take care of the various small wants of the people who manned this ship. Now that there isn’t any one else to play servant to, you’ve picked me as your boss.”
He collected a few other articles—the sleeping bag of his flier, several astronomical instruments and the case containing his artist’s equipment—and thrust them into the waiting arms of the robot;
“Might as well take this stuff along too,” he said, “so I won’t have to climb down again and get it.”
He paused to see what the friendly mechanism would do next. The result was just faintly amusing. After a moment of uncertainty it approached him. A stubby member which was part of the frill of appendages around its throat elongated itself like a telescope, coiled its metal length around his waist and hoisted him easily off his feet. Then the serpentine monster made its weaving way to the stair and commenced to ascend with its new master and the bulky equipment.
“Hey!” Van Tyren protested. “This is making a good thing too good! I’m not a cripple!”
But even though the automaton may have possessed a means of divining the telepathic waves of the thoughts behind Jan’s words, still it had its way with him.
The man, hardened and self-reliant though he had always been, accepted the mild, emasculating yoke of a monster of which he really knew nothing, quite as trustingly as a child accepts the love of its mother. The blue ray was not penetrating his body here, but its care-effacing power still persisted. And he had no thought of the possibly dangerous consequences of the spell.
He remembered the Mercurian who had valeted one of the friends of his student days. Khambee was the Mercurian’s name—a curious elf whose unobtrusive yet insistent indulgence was much the same as that of this me
chanical slave.
“Khambee the second,” Van Tyren pronounced good-naturedly, bestowing the nomen on the automaton that bore him. “It fits you.”
In the chamber of wonders beyond the airlock, Jan set out his meal and ate, while Khambee watched with his camera eye, as if to learn the intricacies of the task.
Then he crept through an opening in the wall and returned with a bowl containing cubes of a golden, translucent compound that emitted a pleasant odor. He set the bowl beside the man.
Van Tyren took one of the cubes, tasted it, and devoured it without considering that, to his Earthly system, the substance might be poisonous. But he experienced no ill effects. The food was slightly fibrous, but sweet and tasty. He consumed more of it with relish.
The blue rays from the tube on the ceiling poured their lulling effulgence over him. The whisper of music, thin and threadlike and soothing, worked its magic upon his senses. Jan crouched on the floor, his head nodding against his knees.
So he remained for a long time, neither awake nor quite asleep, his brain and nerves pervaded by a deliciously restful quasi-consciousness. Khambee had disappeared, perhaps to attend to some obscure matter in another part of the vessel.
SUCH was the beginning of Jan Van Tyren’s adventure on the derelict. As yet he gave the future no attention, living each careless moment as it came; thinking, but not too deeply. Never before had the instinct of the empire builder in him been so completely submerged.
Just to amuse himself he set up his astronomical instruments and took minute observations of both Jupiter and the stars at intervals of an hour, to discover what sort of path the derelict was following. The angular change in the positions of those celestial landmarks told the story.
The vessel was a moon of the planet Jupiter, swinging around it slowly in an immense orbit many millions of miles across. Probably it had been doing so for eons before men had considered seriously the problem of traffic between worlds.
The fact that it had never been discovered until he had stumbled upon it was easy to explain. Without guidance it would be simpler to find an individual grain of sand on a beach, than to locate so small a satellite in the vastness of the etheric desert.
Now, however, with distances and velocities measured perfectly, there would be no trouble in estimating where the vessel would be at a given second. Jan fumbled with the paper on which he had made his calculations, and then carelessly tossed it aside.
Like the good servant he was, Khambee, who happened to be present, picked it up and placed it in a little case fastened at his throat.
Looking at the stars gleaming so gloriously in the ebon firmament had given Jan Van Tyren an inspiration.
“Men are fools,” he confided to Khambee. “Trouble and misfortune are all the reward they get for their struggles. It was the same with the serpent folk who made you. Those of them who formed the crew of this vessel were killed—murdered.
“Why can’t we escape from all that sort of nonsense, Khambee? Why can’t we fix up this ship so that it can travel out to the stars? What an adventure that would be! Vagabonding from one planet to another without any responsibilities, and without ever returning to the solar system! That would be something worthwhile, Khambee.”
Jan was only talking for companionship’s sake, attempting to give an idle dream a semblance of reality. He did not believe that what he spoke of was possible. There was the matter of food, water, and energy. It seemed unlikely that this decrepit derelict’s supply of each was sufficient for such a venture.
However, Khambee had greater powers at his command than Van Tyren could guess. And there had been built into the inorganic frame of him an astute understanding that penetrated the very motives and purposes animating flesh, bone, nerves and brain tissue.
He appeared to listen attentively to the rustling thought waves of his human master. Then, impelled by the complex urges which the genius of his creator had stamped indelibly into the metal and crystal intricacies of his being, he returned to the tasks which he was meant to do.
And Jan Van Tyren, who had established and bossed Joraanin, the Ganymede colony, continued with his idle play. He slept, he ate exotic foods, he wandered about the ship, he dreamed; but most of all he painted, setting up his easel wherever whim might suggest. And the marvels around him seemed, by their very aura of strangeness, to direct and control his skillful fingers.
He painted great engines with shafts of Sunlight twinkling on them; he studied the highlights that shifted elusively in the hollow grooves of the pillars which the sinuous folk of long ago had used as stairways, and he transferred the forms of those stairways to canvas.
He painted Khambee at work with a flaming welding tool, slim, efficient, and almost noiseless. He even painted scenes and subjects of Earth and Ganymede—pleasant reminiscences, for all that was unpleasant had been shoved far into the background of his mind.
A white collie of his childhood. A jagged mountain jutting out of the red desert of Ganymede. Greta, blond and pretty and smiling. Little Jan with his stiff, yellow curls. Such were the subjects of his pictures. He thought of his wife and child, but only of the happy incidents of their lives together.
The horror was blurred and distant. The blue rays saw to that. And so a will not his own, and perhaps not even Khambee’s, but belonging to a serpentine monster dead for ages, controlled Jan Van Tyren.
At odd moments he watched space, and felt the yearning pull of the stars. Thus many days must have gone by. He did not bother to keep track.
THE TIME CAME when he was aroused from slumber by a throbbing sound, soft, but eloquent of titanic forces at work. He crept out of his sleeping bag and stared at the source of the disturbance. Huge flywheels were spinning. He felt a powerful thrust as the ship’s propulsive equipment took hold for a fraction of a second.
Then Khambee, worming his slender shape like a weaving shuttle here and there among the machinery, broke the contacts of massive switches. The activity died to silence once more. But the test had been made and Jan sensed that it had been successful.
He hurried forward. “We’ve got enough power then?” he demanded huskily. “Have we?”
For an answer the robot opened the side of a cylindrical arrangement, and with the clawed tip of an appendage, pointed to the maze of coils and crystal that glowed with heat inside.
Jan studied the apparatus intently for several minutes. Much of it was beyond his grasp; but there were places where tangible fact corresponded with human theory. Energy from the cosmic ray which exists everywhere in space. Limitless, inexhaustible energy! The engines of the vessel were worked by it.
“I see,” Van Tyren commented quietly. “The power problem is solved. Have we enough food, air, and water?”
Khambee led him through the labyrinths of the ship to a place where he had never been before—a hall lined with vast, transparent tanks, most of them filled with a clear liquid that had been sealed up for ages. There was water enough here to make the ship a little world, independent of outside sources, since none could escape from the sealed hull.
Farther down the corridor were other tanks filled with preserved food supplies, and beyond them were extensive chambers where odd, bulbous things were growing under the intense light of great globes.
Were those growths plants of some kind, or artificial cultures to be classified somewhere between the organic and the inorganic? Their color was deep-green. Was it chlorophyll, or a substance analogous in function to the chlorophyll of green plants? Perhaps it did not matter. Here food was being produced under the action of the intense light.
Carbon dioxide, piped to these chambers from all parts of the craft, was being split up by those queer growths, and the oxygen in it was being freed to refresh the atmosphere of the ship. Khambee had started a process that had been dead for uncounted millenniums; now it could go on indefinitely.
Nourishment, water and oxygen—everything essential to life had been taken care of.
“Speed?” Jan quest
ioned. “Can we build up sufficient speed to travel between the stars without making the trip endless?”
It was an important query. No man-built ship could have reached the outer galaxies in a lifetime, though there were experiments in progress which in a decade or so might produce promising results.
Khambee’s tactile appendages swung toward a huge power-distributer tube near by in a gesture of confidence.
Jan was satisfied. “Then we’re going,” he said. “There’s not much left for me here in the solar system.”
His voice was steady, but the thrill of adventures to come made his heart pound and sent tingling prickles through his scalp muscles.
Khambee the unfathomable offered no protest, yet his actions indicated that there was work still to be done.
He clutched his master’s arm and drew him along gloomy passages to a storeroom filled with various machinery parts and other supplies. Here he selected a great sheaf of metal plates, and bore it back to the airlock which opened into the wrecked compartment where Jan’s space boat was housed. The silvery length of him passed through it, lugging the heavy load.
Jan Van Tyren donned his air-tight armor and followed.
FOR SEVERAL HOURS he watched the slave robot patch the great rent. During that time the effects of the blue ray must have worn off; for presently, of his own volition, he tried to help, holding the massive plates steady while his snake-like henchman welded them into place with a flame tool. Khambee accepted the assistance without protest.
Jan was more his own self now—cool, dominant, purposeful, making ready for a venture which no man had yet attempted.
At last the job was finished. The wreckage of an ancient battle was neatly cleared away, the jagged hole was covered, and only an oval door was left, through which the flier might pass when necessary.
Then and Now : A Collection of SF Page 11
