Explorers of Space Read online

  Decker put his clenched fists upon the table and tried to rise, but his legs were suddenly cold and had turned unaccountably to water, and he could not raise himself.

  “Jackson,” he panted, “go and tap that robot on the shoulder. Tell him we want beer.”

  He saw the rear that whitened Jackson’s face as he rose and moved slowly forward. Inside himself he felt the terror start and worry at his throat.

  Jackson stood beside the robot and reached out a hesitant hand, tapped him gently on the shoulder, tapped him harder—and the robot fell flat upon its face!

  Feet hammered across the hard-packed ground, heading for the pavilion.

  Decker jerked himself around, sat foursquare and solid in his chair, waiting for the man who ran.

  It was MacDonald, the chief engineer.

  He halted in front of Decker and his hands, scarred and grimy with years of fighting balky engines, reached down and gripped the boards of the table’s edge. His seamy face was twisted as if he were about to weep.

  “The ship, sir. The ship . . .”

  Decker nodded, almost idly. “I know, Mr. MacDonald. The ship won’t run.”

  MacDonald gulped. “The big stuff’s all right, sir. But the little gadgets . . . the injector mechanism . . . the—”

  He stopped abruptly and stared at Decker. “You knew,” he said. “How did you know?”

  “I knew,” said Decker, “that someday it would come. Not like this, perhaps. But in any one of several ways. I knew that the day would come when our luck would run too thin. I talked big, like the rest of you, of course, but I knew that it would come. The day when we’d covered all the possibilities but the one that we could not suspect, and that, of course, would be the one that would ruin us.”

  He was thinking, the natives had no metal. No sign of any metal in their village at all. Their dishes were soapstone, and they wore no ornaments. Their implements were stone. And yet they were intelligent enough, civilized enough, cultured enough to have fabricated metal. For there was metal here, a great deposit of it in the western mountains. They had tried perhaps, many centuries ago, had fashioned metal tools and had them go to pieces underneath their fingers in a few short weeks.

  A civilization without metal. A culture without metal. It was unthinkable. Take metal from a man and he went back to the caves. Take metal from a man and he was earth-bound, and his bare hands were all he had.

  Waldron came into the pavilion, walking quietly in the silence. “The radio is dead,” he said, “and the robots are dying like flies. The place is littered with them, just so much scrap metal.”

  Decker nodded. “The little stuff, the finely fabricated, will go first,” he said. “Like watches and radio innards and robot brains and injector mechanisms. Next, the generators will go and we will have no lights or power. Then the machines will break down and the Legion’s weapons will be no more than clubs. After that, the big stuff, probably.”

  “The native told us,” Waldron said, “when you talked to him. ‘You will never leave,’ he said.”

  “We didn’t understand,” said Decker. “We thought he was threatening us and we knew that we were too big, too well guarded for any threat of his to harm us. He wasn’t threatening us at all, of course. He was just telling us.”

  He made a hopeless gesture with his hands. “What is it?”

  “No one knows,” said Waldron quietly. “Not yet, at least. Later we may find out, but it won’t help us any. A microbe, maybe. A virus. Something that eats iron after it has been subjected to heat or alloyed with other metals. It doesn’t go for iron ore. If it did, that deposit we found would have been gone long ago.”

  “If that is true,” said Decker, “we’ve brought it the first square meal it’s had in a long, long time. A thousand years. Maybe a million years. There is no fabricated metal here. How would it survive? Without stuff to eat, how would it live?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Waldron. “It might not be a metal-eating organism at all. It might be something else. Something in the atmosphere.”

  “We tested the atmosphere.” But, even as the words left his mouth, Decker saw how foolish they were. They had tested the atmosphere, but how could they have detected something they had never run across before? Man’s yardstick was limited—limited to the things he knew about, limited by the circle of his own experience. He guarded himself against the obvious and the imaginable. He could not guard himself against the unknowable or the unimaginable.

  Decker rose and saw Jackson still standing by the pavilion pole, with the robot stretched at his feet.

  “You have your answer,” he told the biochemist. “Remember that first day here? You talked with me in the lounge.”

  Jackson nodded. “I remember, sir.”

  And suddenly, Decker realized, the entire base was quiet.

  A gust of wind came out of the jungle and rattled the canvas.

  Now, for the first time since they had landed, he caught in the wind the alien smell of an alien world.

  KYRIE

  Poul Anderson

  A haunting and touching story of a strange form of life and a strange kind of love, by a writer whose crowded shelf of Hugo and Nebula awards testifies to the skill and the art with which he mixes science and fiction.

  ON A high peak in the Lunar Carpathians stands a convent of St. Martha of Bethany. The walls are native rock; they lift, dark and cragged as the mountainside itself, into a sky that is always black. As you approach from Northpole, flitting low to keep the force screen along Route Plato between you and the meteoroidal rain, you see the cross which surmounts the tower, stark athwart Earth’s blue disk. No bells resound from there—not in airlessness.

  You may hear them inside at the canonical hours, and throughout the crypts below where machines toil to maintain a semblance of terrestrial environment. If you linger a while you will also hear them calling to requiem mass. For it has become a tradition that prayers be offered at St. Martha’s for those who have perished in space; and they are more with every passing year.

  This is not the work of the sisters. They minister to the sick, the needy, the crippled, the insane, all whom space has broken and cast back. Luna is full of such, exiles because they can no longer endure Earth’s pull or because it is feared they may be incubating a plague from some unknown planet or because men are so busy with their frontiers that they have no time to spare for the failures. The sisters wear spacesuits as often as habits, are as likely to hold a medikit as a rosary.

  But they are granted some time for contemplation. At night, when for half a month the sun’s glare has departed, the chapel is unshuttered and stars look down through the glaze-dome to the candles. They do not wink and their light is winter cold. One of the nuns in particular is there as often as may be, praying for her own dead. And the abbess sees to it that she can be present when the yearly mass, that she endowed before she took her vows, is sung.

  Requiem aeternam dona eis,

  Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

  Kyrie eleison,

  Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.

  The Supernova Sagittarii expedition comprised fifty human beings and a flame. It went the long way around from Earth orbit, stopping at Epsilon Lyrae to pick up its last member. Thence it approached its destination by stages.

  This is the paradox: time and space are aspects of each other. The explosion was more than a hundred years past when noted by men on Lasthope. They were part of a generations-long effort to fathom the civilization of creatures altogether unlike us; but one night they looked up and saw a light so brilliant it cast shadows.

  That wave front would reach Earth several centuries hence. By then it would be so tenuous that nothing but another bright point would appear in the sky. Meanwhile, though, a ship overleaping the space through which light must creep could track the great star’s death across time.

  Suitably far off, instruments recorded what had been before the outburst: incandescence collapsing upon itself aft
er the last nuclear fuel was burned out. A jump, and they saw what happened a century ago: convulsion, storm of quanta and neutrinos, a radiation equal to the massed hundred billion suns of this galaxy.

  It faded, leaving an emptiness in heaven, and the Raven moved closer. Fifty light-years—fifty years—inward, she studied a shrinking fieriness in the midst of a fog which shone like lightning.

  Twenty-five years later the central globe had dwindled more, the nebula had expanded and dimmed. But because the distance was now so much less, everything seemed larger and brighter. The naked eye saw a dazzle too fierce to look straight at, making the constellations pale by contrast. Telescopes showed a blue-white spark in the heart of an opalescent cloud delicately filamented at the edges.

  The Raven made ready for her final jump, to the immediate neighborhood of the supernova.

  Captain Teodor Szili went on a last-minute inspection tour. The ship murmured around him, running at one gravity of acceleration to reach the desired intrinsic velocity. Power droned, regulators whickered, ventilation systems rustled. He felt the energies quiver in his bones. But metal surrounded him, blank and comfortless. Viewports gave on a dragon’s hoard of stars, the ghostly arch of the Milky Way: on vacuum, cosmic rays, cold not far above absolute zero, distance beyond imagination to the nearest human hearthfire. He was about to take his people where none had ever been before, into conditions none was sure about, and that was a heavy burden on him.

  He found Eloise Waggoner at her post, a cubbyhole with intercom connections directly to the command bridge. Music drew him, a triumphant serenity he did not recognize. Stopping in the doorway, he saw her seated with a small tape machine on the desk.

  “What’s this?” he demanded.

  “Oh!” The woman (he could not think of her as a girl though she was barely out of her teens) started. “I . . . I was waiting for the jump.”

  “You were to wait at the alert.”

  “What have I to do?” she answered less timidly than was her wont. “I mean, I’m not a crewman or a scientist.”

  “You are in the crew. Special communications technician.”

  “With Lucifer. And he likes the music. He says we come closer to oneness with it than in anything else he knows about us.”

  Szili arched his brows. “Oneness?”

  A blush went up Eloise’s thin cheeks. She stared at the deck and her hands twisted together. “Maybe that isn’t the right word. Peace, harmony, unity . . . God? . . . I sense what he means, but we haven’t any word that fits.”

  “Hm. Well, you are supposed to keep him happy.” The skipper regarded her with a return of the distaste he had tried to suppress. She was a decent sort, he supposed, in her gauche and inhibited way; but her looks! Scrawny, bigfooted, big-nosed, pop eyes, and stringy dust-colored hair—and, to be sure, telepaths always made him uncomfortable. She said she could only read Lucifer’s mind, but was that true?

  No. Don’t think such things. Loneliness and otherness can come near breaking you out here, without adding suspicion of your fellows.

  If Eloise Waggoner was really human. She must be some kind of mutant at the very least. Whoever could communicate thought to thought with a living vortex had to be. “What are you playing, anyhow?” Szili asked.

  “Bach. The Third Brandenburg Concerto. He, Lucifer, he doesn’t care for the modern stuff. I don’t either.”

  You wouldn’t, Szili decided. Aloud: “Listen, we jump in half an hour. No telling what we’ll emerge in. This is the first time anyone’s been close to a recent supernova. We can only be certain of so much hard radiation that we’ll be dead if the screenfields give way. Otherwise we’ve nothing to go on except theory. And a collapsing stellar core is so unlike anything anywhere else in the universe that I’m skeptical about how good the theory is. We can’t sit daydreaming. We have to prepare.”

  “Yes, sir.” Whispering, her voice lost its usual harshness.

  He stared past her, past the ophidian ey6s of meters and controls, as if he could penetrate the steel beyond and look straight into space. There, he knew, floated Lucifer.

  The image grew in him: a fireball twenty meters across, shimmering white, red, gold, royal blue, flames dancing like Medusa locks, cometary tail burning for a hundred meters behind, a shiningness, a glory, a piece of hell. Not the least of what troubled him was the thought of that which paced his ship.

  He hugged scientific explanations to his breast, though they were little better than guesses. In the multiple-star system of Epsilon Aurigae, in the gas and energy pervading the space around, things took place which no laboratory could imitate. Ball lightning on a planet was perhaps analogous, as the formation of simple organic compounds in a primordial ocean is analogous to the life which finally evolves. In Epsilon Aurigae, magnetohydrodynamics had done what chemistry did on Earth. Stable plasma vortices had appeared, had grown, had added complexity, until after millions of years they became something you must needs call an organism. It was a form of ions, nuclei and force-fields. It metabolized electrons, nucleons, X rays; it maintained its configuration for a long lifetime; it reproduced; it thought.

  But what did it think? The few telepaths who could communicate with the Aurigeans, who had first made humankind aware that the Aurigeans existed, never explained clearly. They were a queer lot themselves.

  Wherefore Captain Szili said, “I want you to pass this on to him.”

  “Yes, sir.” Eloise turned down the volume on her taper. Her eyes unfocused. Through her ears went words, and her brain (how efficient a transducer was it?) passed the meanings on out to him who loped alongside Raven on his own reaction drive.

  “Listen, Lucifer. You have heard this often before, I know, but I want to be positive you understand in full. Your psychology must be very foreign to ours. Why did you agree to come with us? I don’t know. Technician Waggoner said you were curious and adventurous. Is that the whole truth?

  “No matter. In half an hour we jump. We’ll come within five hundred million kilometers of the supernova. That’s where your work begins. You can go where we dare not, observe what we can’t, tell us more than our instruments would ever hint at. But first we have to verify we can stay in orbit around the star. This concerns you too. Dead men can’t transport you home again.

  “So. In order to enclose you within the jumpfield, without disrupting your body, we have to switch off the shield screens. We’ll emerge in a lethal radiation zone. You must promptly retreat from the ship, because we’ll start the screen generator up sixty seconds after transit. Then you must investigate the vicinity. The hazards to look for—” Szili listed them. “Those are only what we can foresee. Perhaps we’ll hit other garbage we haven’t predicted. If anything seems like a menace, return at once, warn us, and prepare for a jump back to here. Do you have that? Repeat.”

  Words jerked from Eloise. They were a correct recital; but how much was she leaving out?

  “Very good.” Szili hesitated. “Proceed with your concert

  if you like. But break it off at zero minus ten minutes and stand by.”

  “Yes, sir.” She didn’t look at him. She didn’t appear to be looking anywhere in particular.

  His footsteps clacked down the corridor and were lost.

  —Why did he say the same things over? asked Lucifer.

  “He is afraid,” Eloise said.

  —?—

  “I guess you don’t know about fear,” she said.

  —Can you show me? . . . No, do not. I sense it is hurtful. You must not be hurt.

  “I can’t be afraid anyway, when your mind is holding mine.”

  (Warmth filled her. Merriment was there, playing like little flames over the surface of Father-leading-her-by-the-hand-when-she-was-just-a-child-and-they-went-out-one-summer’s-day-to-pick-wildflowers; over strength and gentleness and Bach and God.) Lucifer swept around the hull in an exuberant curve. Sparks danced in his wake.

  —Think flowers again. Please.

  She tried.


  —They are like (image, as nearly as a human brain could grasp, of fountains blossoming with gamma-ray colors in the middle of light, everywhere light). But so tiny. So brief a sweetness.

  “I don’t understand how you can understand,” she whispered.

  —You understand for me. I did not have that kind of thing to love, before you came.

  “But you have so much else. I try to share it, but I’m not made to realize what a star is.”

  —Nor I for planets. Yet ourselves may touch.

  Her cheeks burned anew. The thought rolled on, interweaving its counterpoint to the marching music.

  —That is why I came, do you know? For you. I am fire and air. I had not tasted the coolness of water, the patience of earth, until you showed me. You are moonlight on an ocean.

  “No, don’t,” she said. “Please.”

  Puzzlement:—Why not? Does joy hurt? Are you not used to it?

  “I, I guess that’s right.” She flung her head back. “No! Be damned if I’ll feel sorry for myself!”

  —Why should you? Have we not all reality to be in, and is it not full of suns and songs?

  “Yes, To you. Teach me.”

  —If you in turn will teach me—The thought broke off. A contact remained, unspeaking, such as she imagined must often prevail among lovers.

  She glowered at Motilal Mazundar’s chocolate face, where the physicist stood in the doorway. “What do you want?”

  He was surprised. “Only to see if everything is well with you, Miss Waggoner.”

  She bit her lip. He had tried harder than most aboard to be kind to her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to bark at you. Nerves.”

  “We are everyone on edge.” He smiled. “Exciting though this venture is, it will be good to come home, correct?”