The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

With the hand claws of their suits touching, the two men began to walk forward. They could see Baron’s instruments standing deserted a short way off, and instinctively moved towards them. There was no need for lights; the entire bowl of the sky was awash with stars.

The Wilson was a deep penetration cartographic ship. With two sister ships, it was the first such vessel to venture into the heart of the Crab Nebula. There, weaving its way among the endless abysses of interstellar dust, it lost contact with the Brinkdale and the Grandon. The curtains of uncreated matter closed in on them, baffling even the subradio.

They went on. As they went, the concepts of space they had once held were erased. This was a domain of light and matter, not of emptiness and dark. All about them were coils of smoke – smoke set with sequins! – and cliffs of shimmering dust the surface of which they could not have explored in two lifetimes. To begin with the four men were elated at the sheer magnificence of the new environment. Later, the magnificence seemed not of beauty but of annihilation. It was too big, they were too insignificant. The four men retreated into silence.

But the ship continued on its course, for they had their orders and their honour, and their pay. According to plan, the Wilson sank into the heart of the nebula. The instrumentation had developed an increasing fault until it became folly to go farther, but fortunately they had then come to a region less tightly packed with stars and star matter. Beyond that was space, light years across, entirely free of physical bodies – except one.

They found soon enough that it was no stroke of fortune to be here. Swilling in the middle of the gigantic hole in space was the phenomenon they christened Big Bertha.

It was too big. It was impossible. But the instruments ceased to be reliable; without instruments, human senses were useless in such a region. Already bemused by travel, they were ill-equipped to deal with Big Bertha. To add to their troubles, the directional cyboscope that governed the jets in the ship’s equator broke down and became unreliable.

They took the only course open to them: they landed on the nearest possible body, to rest there while they did a repair job and re-established contact with their sister ships. The nearest possible body happened to be Erewhon.

Touchdown on Erewhon had been a little miracle, accomplished with few other instruments than human eyes, human hands, and a string of human blasphemies. The hammer of static radiated by Big Bertha rendered radio, radar, and radix all ineffective.

Now the sky was a wonder painful to view. Everywhere were the glittering points of stars, everywhere the immense plumes and shawls of inchoate matter illuminated by star-shine. Yet it was all far away, glittering beyond the gravitational pull of Bertha. In her domain, only the wretched planetoid the Wilson rested on seemed to exist. It was like being a bone alone in an empty room with a starving dog.

‘Gravitation can be felt not only in the muscles but in the thalamus. It is a power of darkness, perhaps the ultimate power.’

‘What’s that?’ Malravin asked, startled.

‘I was thinking aloud.’ Embarrassed, Sharn added, ‘Bertha will rise in a minute, Ike. Are you ready for it?’

They stopped by the pathetic cluster of instruments. They just stood there, rooted to the spot with a tension that could not be denied. Bertha had already begun to rise.

Their eyes were bad judges of what happened next, even with the infra-red screens pulled down over their faceplates. But they partly saw – and partly they felt, for a tidal sensation crawled across their bodies.

Above the eastern horizon, a section of the star field began to melt and sag. Star after star, cluster after cluster, uncountably stratified and then wavered and ran towards the horizon like ill-applied paint trickling down a wall. As if in sympathy, distortion also seized the bodies of Sharn and Malravin.

‘An illusion, an optical illusion,’ Malravin said, raising a hand to the melting lines of stars. ‘Gravity bending light. But I’ve – Eddy, I’ve got something in my suit with me. Let’s get back to the ship.’

Sharn could not reply. He fought silently with something inside his own suit, something closer to him than his muscles.

Where the stars flowed, something was lumbering up over the horizon, a great body sure of its strength, rising powerfully from its grave, thrusting up now a shoulder now a torso into the visible. It was Bertha. The two men sank clumsily to their knees.

Whatever it was, it was gigantic. It occupied about twenty degrees of arc. It climbed above the horizon – but more and more of it kept coming, and it seemed to expand as it came – it rose tall, swallowing the sky as it rose. Its outline indicated that it was spherical, though the outline was not distinct, the wavering bands of starlight rendering it impossible to see properly.

The sensation in Sharn’s body had changed. He felt lighter now, and more comfortable. The feeling that he was wearing someone else’s body had disappeared. In its place had come an odd lopsidedness. Drained, he could only peer up at the disturbance.

Whatever it was, it ate the sky. It did not radiate light. Yet what could be seen of it was clearly not seen by reflected light. It darkled in the sky.

‘It – emits black light,’ Sharn said. ‘Is it alive, Ike?’

‘It’s going to crush us,’ Ike said. He turned to crawl back to the ship, but at that instant the atmosphere hit them.

Sharn had drawn his gaze away from that awesome monster in space to see what Malravin was doing, so that he saw the atmosphere arrive. He put a claw up to shield his face as it hit.

The atmosphere came up over the horizon after Bertha. It came in long strands, travelling fast. With it came sound, a whisper that grew to a shriek that shrilled inside their faceplates. At first the vapour was no more than a confusion in the gloom, but as it thickened it became visible as drab grey cloud. There were electrical side effects too; corposants glowed along the ridges of rock about them. The cloud rose rapidly, engulfing them like an intangible sea.

Sharn found he was on his knees beside Malravin. They both had their headlights on now, and headed for the ship in a rapid shuffle. It was hard going. That lopsided effect spoilt their instinctive placing of their limbs.

Once they were touching the metal of the Wilson’s airlock, some of the panic left them. Both men stood up, breathing heavily. The level of the greyish gas had risen above their heads. Sharn moved out from under the bulk of the Wilson and looked into the sky. Bertha was still visible through haze.

It was evident that Erewhon had a rapid rotation speed. The monstrous black disc was already almost at zenith; surrounded by a halo of distorted starglow, it loured over the little ship like a milestone about to fall. Hesitantly, Sharn put up his hand to see if he could touch it.

Malravin tugged at his arm.

‘There’s nothing there,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible. It’s a dream, a figment. It’s the sort of thing you see in a dream. And how do you feel now? Very light now, as in a dream! It’s just a nightmare, and you’ll –’

‘You’re talking bloody nonsense, Malravin. You’re trying to escape into madness if you pretend it isn’t there. You wait till it falls down and crushes us all flat into the rock – then you’ll see whether it’s a dream or not!’

Malravin broke from him and ran to the air lock. He opened the door and climbed in, beckoning to Sharn. Sharn stood where he was, laughing. The other’s absurd notion, so obviously a product of fear, had set Sharn into a high good humour. He did – Malravin was right there – feel much lighter than he had done; it made him light-headed.

‘Challenge,’ he said. ‘Challenge and response. The whole history of life can be related in those terms. That must go into the book. Those that do not respond go to the wall.’

‘It’s some sort of a nightmare, Eddy! What is that thing up there? It’s no sun! Come in here, for God’s sake!’ Malravin called from the safety of the air lock.

‘You fool, this is no dream or I’d be a figment of it, and you know that’s nonsense. You’re losing your head, that’s all.’

In his contempt for Malravin, he turned his back on the man, and began to stride over the plain. Each stride took him a long floating way. He switched off his intercom, and at once the fellow’s voice was cut out of existence. In the helmet fell a perfect peace.

He found he was not afraid to look up at the lumbering beast in the sky.

‘Put anything into words and it loses that touch of tabu to which fear attaches. That thing is a thing overhead. It may be some sort of a physical body. It may be some sort of a whirlpool operating in space in a way we do not yet understand. It may be an effect in space itself, caused by the stresses in the heart of a nebula. There must be all sorts of unexpected pressures there. So I put the thing into words and it ceases to worry me.’

He had got only to chapter four in the autobiography he was writing, but he saw that it would be necessary at some point – perhaps at the focal point of the book – to explain what prompted a man to go into deep space, and what sustained him when he got there. This experience on Erewhon was valuable, an intellectual experience as much as anything. It would be something to recall in the years to come – if that beast did not fall and squash him! It was leaping at him, directly overhead.

Again he was down full length, yelling into the dead microphone. He was too light to nuzzle properly, heavily, deeply, into the ground, and he cried his dismay till the helmet rang with sound.

He stopped the noise abruptly.

‘Got dizzy,’ he told himself. He shut his eyes, squeezing up his face to do so. ‘Don’t relax your control over yourself, Ed. Think of those fools in the ship, how they’d laugh. Remember nothing can hurt a man who has enough resilience.’ He opened his eyes. The next thing would be to get up. He switched on his helmet light

The ground was moving beneath him. For a while he stared fascinated at it. A light dust of grit and sand crawled over the solid rock at an unhurried but steady pace. He put his metal claw into it, and it piled against the barrier like water against a dam. Must be quite a wind blowing, Sharn told himself. Looking along the ground, he saw the particles trundled slowly towards the west. The west was veiled in the cloud-like atmosphere; into it, the great grinding shape of Big Bertha was sinking at a noticeable rate.

Now other fears overcame him. He saw Erewhon for what it was, a fragment of rock twirling over and over. He – the ship – the others – they clung to this bit of rock like flies, and – and – no, that was something he couldn’t face, not alone out here. Something else occurred to him. Planetoids as small as Erewhon did not possess atmospheres. So this atmosphere had been something else fairly recently; he saw it as an ice casing, embalming the rock. Suddenly, more than irrational fear made him want to run – there was a logical reason as well. He switched on his mike and began to shout as he stumbled back towards the ship: ‘I’m coming back, fellers, open up! Open up, I’m coming back!’

Some of the drive casing was off. Malravin’s feet protruded from the cluttered cavity. He was in there with an arc lamp, still patiently working on the directional cyboscope.

The other three sat round in bucket seats, talking. Sharn had changed his clothes, towelled himself down, and had a hot cup of Stimulous. Baron and the captain smoked mescahales.

‘We’ve established that Erewhon’s period of rotation is two hours, five minutes odd,’ Dominguey told Sharn. ‘That gives us about an hour of night when the ship is shielded from Big Bertha by the bulk of the planetoid. Sunset of the night after next will fall just before twenty hours, Galactic Mean. At twenty hours, all governmental ships keep open-listed for distress signals. Shielded from Bertha’s noise, we stand our best chance of contacting the Grandon and the Brinkdale then. There’s hope for us yet!’

Sharn nodded, Baron said, ‘You’re too much the optimist, Billy. Nobody can ever get to rescue us.’ He spoke in an amused, confident tone.

‘How’s that again?’

‘I said nobody can ever reach us, man. Consider it like this, man. We left ordinary space behind when we started burying into the nebula to get here. This little spot involves a number of paradoxes, doesn’t it? I mean, we agree that there’s nowhere else like this place in the universe, don’t we?’

‘No we don’t,’ Dominguey said. ‘We agree that in less than eleven hundred years of galactic exploration we have covered only a small section of one arm of one galaxy. We don’t know enough as yet to be capable of labelling an unusual situation paradoxical. Though I’ll agree it’s a poor spot for a picnic. Now, you were saying?’

‘Don’t try and be funny, Billy. This is not the place for humour – not even graveyard humour.’ Baron smiled as if the remark had a significance only he knew. He gestured with one hand, gracefully. ‘We are in a place that cannot possibly exist. That monstrous thing up in space cannot be a sun or any known body, or we would have got a spectroscopic reading from it. It cannot be a dead sun, or we would not see it as we do. This planetoid cannot be a planetoid, for in reality it would be so near Bertha it would be swept into it by irresistible gravitational forces. You were right to call it Erewhon. That’s what it is – Nowhere.’

Sharn spoke. ‘You’re playing with Malravin’s silly theory, Baron. You’re pretending we are in a nightmare. Let me assure you such assumptions are based entirely on withdrawal –’

‘I don’t want to hear!’ Baron said. The smile on his lips became gentler. ‘You wouldn’t understand, Sharn. You are so clever you prefer to tell me what I think rather than hear what I think. But I’m going to tell you what I think. I don’t think we are undergoing a nightmare. I think we are dead.’

Sharn rose, and began pacing behind his seat.

‘Dominguey, you don’t think this?’

‘I don’t feel dead.’

‘Good. Keep feeling that way or we’re going to be in trouble. You know what the matter is with Baron. He’s a weak character. He has always supported himself with science and the methods of science – we’ve had nothing but a diet of facts from him for the last thousand light years. Now he thinks science has failed him. There’s nothing else left. He can no longer face the physical world. So, he comes to this emotional conclusion that he is dead. Classic withdrawal symptoms.’

Dominguey said, ‘Someone ought to kick your ass, Eddy Sharn. Of all the glib and conceited idiots I ever met. … At least Jim has come out with an idea. It’s not so far-fetched at that, when you consider we know nothing about what happens after death. Think about it a bit, think about the first few moments of death. Try to visualise the period after heart action has ceased, when the body, and particularly the brain inside its skull case, still retains its warmth. What goes on then? Suppose in that period of time everything in the brain drains away into nothing like a bucket of water leaking into sand. Don’t you think some pretty vivid and hallucinatory things would happen inside that head? And, after all, the sort of events happening to us now are typical of the sort that might occur to spacers like us in that dying period. Maybe we ran smack into a big chunk of dead matter on our way into the Crab. Okay, we’re all dead – the strong feeling of helplessness we all have is a token of the fact that we are really strewn over the control cabin with the walls caved in.’

Lazily clapping his hands, Baron said, ‘You put it even better than I could have put it myself, Billy.’

‘Don’t think I believe what I am saying, though,’ Dominguey said grimly. ‘You know me, laddie: ever the funny man, even to death.’

He stood up and confronted Sharn.

‘What I am trying to say, Eddy, is that you are too fond of your own opinions. I know the way your mind works – you’re much happier in any situation if you can make yourself believe that the other people involved are inferior to you. Now then, if you have a theory that helps us tackle this particular section of hell, Jim and I would be pleased to hear it.’

‘Give me a mescahale,’ Sharn said. He had heard such outbursts from the captain before, and attributed them to Dominguey’s being less stable than he liked to pretend he was. Dominguey would be dangerous in a crisis. Not that this was less than a crisis. Sharn accepted the yellow cylinder, activated it, stuck it into his mouth, and sat down. Dominguey sat down beside him, regarding him with interest. They both smoked in silence.

‘Begin then, Eddy. It’s time we took a quick sleep, the lot of us. We’re all exhausted, and it’s beginning to show.’

‘On you maybe, Dominguey.’ He turned to Baron, languidly sunk in his chair.

‘Are you listening, Baron?’

Baron nodded his head.

‘Go ahead. Don’t mind me.’

Things would be so much simpler if one were a robot, Sharn thought. Personalities would not be involved. Any situation has to be situation plus character. It’s bad enough to be burdened with one’s own character; one has to put up with other people’s as well. He pulled out his little notebook to write the thought down, saw Dominguey was eyeing him, and began to speak abruptly.

‘What’s your silly fuss about? We’re here to do a job of observation – why not do it? Before Ike and I went outside, you told us to watch for the atmosphere. I did just that, but from the nonsense you talk about being dead I’d say you were the ones who should have watched it. And this peculiar bodily sensation – you let it rattle you. So did Ike – so did I – but it doesn’t take much knowledge to realise that the horrible sensation as if something were climbing about inside the suit with you has a rational and obvious explanation.’

Baron got up and walked away.

‘Come back when I’m talking, Baron,’ Sharn said, angrily.

‘I’m going to see how Malravin is getting on, then I’m going to bunk down. If you have anything interesting to say, Billy can give it to me in a nutshell later. Your double talk holds nothing for me. I’m tired of your speeches.’

‘Tired? – When you’re dead? Needing to bunk down? – When you’re dead?’

‘Leave him, for God’s sake, and get on with what you were saying,’ Dominguey said with a yawn. ‘Look, Eddy, we’re in a nasty spot here – I don’t just mean stuck on Erewhon, though that’s bad enough. But much more getting on each other’s nerves and there will be murder done. I’d say you were turning into a very good candidate for the axe.’

‘You toying with the idea of murder, Dominguey? I suppose that could be another refuge from the realities of the position.’

‘Knock off that line of talk, Sharn, and that’s an order. You were talking about this strange bodily sensation we felt out on the rock. Don’t be so coy about it. It’s caused by the fact that most of our weight out there comes by courtesy of Big Bertha, not Erewhon. Your mass orients itself partly according to where Bertha is, and not according to the body you are standing on. Of course it causes some odd sensations, particularly with respect to your proprioceptors and the balance in your inner ear. When the sun first rises, your intellect has to fight your body out of its tendency to regard the east as down. When the sun’s overhead, the situation’s not so bad, but your mass will always act as a compass, as it were, tending towards the sun – if Bertha is a sun. Have I taken the words out of your mouth?’

Sharn nodded.

‘Since you’re so smart, Billy, you’ve probably worked out that Bertha is a star – a big star … a star, that is, with an abnormally large mass. And I do mean abnormally – it’s got an unique chance to grow here. It has accumulated bulk from the nebula. Its mass must be something above twenty-five million times the mass of Sol.’

Dominguey whistled. ‘A pretty tall order! Though I see it is well placed for stellar growth processes. So you think it is just a gigantic accumulation of dead matter?’

‘Not at all. There’s no such thing as dead matter in that sense. Baron’s the scientist – he’d tell you if he wasn’t heading for catatonia. You get such a mass of material together and terrific pressures are set up. No, I’m saying Bertha is a tremendous live sun built from dead nebular matter.’

‘That’s all nonsense, though, Eddy. We don’t even see it properly except as a shimmering blackness. If your theory were correct, Bertha would be a white giant. We’d all be scorched out of existence, sitting here so close to it.’

‘No, you’re forgetting your elementary relativity. I’ve worked this out. This is no fool hypothesis. I said Bertha had twenty-five million times Sol’s mass for a good reason. Because if you have a sun that big, the force of gravity at its surface is so colossal that even light cannot escape off into space.’

Dominguey put his mescahale down and stared at the nearest bulkhead with his mouth open.

‘By the saints … Eddy, could that be so? What follows from that? I mean, is there any proof?’

‘There’s the visible distortion of distant starlight by Bertha’s bulk that gives you some idea of the gravitational forces involved. And the interferometer offers some guide. It’s still working. I used it out on the surface before I came back aboard. Why didn’t you try it? I suppose you and Baron panicked out there, as Malravin did? Bertha has an angular diameter of twenty-two degrees of arc. If the mass is as I say, then you can reckon its diameter in miles. Should be 346 times the sun’s, or about some 300 million miles. That’s presuming a lot, I know, but it gives us a rough guide. And from there a spot of trig will tell you how far we are from Bertha. I make it something less than one billion six hundred million miles. You know what that means – we’re as far from Bertha as Uranus is from Sol, which with a body of Bertha’s size means we’re very nearly on top of it!’

‘Now you’re beginning to frighten me,’ Dominguey said. He looked frightened, dark skin stretched over his cheekbones as he pressed his temples with his fingertips. Behind them, Baron and Malravin were quarrelling. Baron had tripped over the other’s foot as he lay with his head in the drive box, and they were having a swearing match. Neither Dominguey nor Sharn paid them any attention.

‘No, there’s one hole in your theory,’ Dominguey finally said.

‘Such as?’

‘Such as if Erewhon was as close as that to its primary, it could never hold its orbit. It would be drawn into Bertha.’

Sharn stared at the captain, mulling over his answer. Life was a misery, but there was always some pleasure to be wrung from the misery.

‘I got the answer to that when I was outside rolling on the sterile stinking rockface,’ he said. ‘The vapour came pouring over the ground at me. I knew Erewhon was too small to retain any atmosphere for any length of time. In fact it was diffusing into space fast. Therefore, not so long ago, that atmosphere was lying in hollows on the surface, liquid. Follow me?’

Dominguey swallowed and said, ‘Go on.’

‘You made the assumption that Erewhon bore a planetary relationship to Bertha, Dominguey. You were wrong. Erewhon is spinning in from a colder region. The rocks are heating up. We haven’t settled on a planetoid – we’re squatting on a hunk of rock spiralling rapidly into the sun.’

There came the sound of a blow, and Malravin grunted. He jumped at Baron and the two men clinched, pummelling each other’s backs rather foolishly. Dominguey and Sharn ran up and pulled them apart. Dead or not, Baron was giving a fair account of himself.

‘All right,’ Dominguey said angrily. ‘So we’ve run ourselves ragged. We need sleep. You three bunk down, give yourselves sedatives. I’ll get on fixing the cybo, Malravin. Set the alarm signal for nineteen hours fifty, G.M., so that we don’t miss calling Grandon and Brinkdale, and bunk down. We want to get out of here – and we all want to get out of here. Go on, move – you too, Eddy. Your theory has me convinced. We’re leaving as soon as possible, so I’m having peace while I work.’