Collected Short Fiction, page 670
“The webfoam,” he said.
Rawlins, who had been standing as though in a trance, burst into sudden activity. He darted forward, seized Reynold’s gun from its holster, ran toward Muller and pressed the weapon into his hand. “There,” he said thickly. “Now you’re in charge.”
Muller studied the gun as though he had never seen one before, but his surprise lasted only a fraction of a second. He slipped his hand around its comfortable butt and fingered the firing stud. It was a familiar model, only slightly changed from the ones he had known. In a quick flaring burst he could kill them all. Or himself.
He stepped back so they could not come upon him from the rear. Then he moved the gun in an arc of some 270 degrees, taking them all in.
“Stand close together,” he said. “The six of you. Stand one meter apart in a straight row and keep your hands out where I can see them at all times.”
He enjoyed the black glowering look that Boardman threw at Ned Rawlins. The boy seemed dazed, flushed, confused, a figure in a dream. Muller waited patiently as the six men arranged themselves according to his orders. He was surprised at his own calmness.
“You look unhappy, Charles,” he said. “How old are you now, eighty years? You’d like to live that other seventy, eighty, ninety, I guess. You have your career planned, and the plan doesn’t include dying on Lemnos. Stand still, Charles. And stand straight. You won’t win any pity from me by trying to look old and sagging. I know that dodge. You’re as healthy as I am, beneath the phony flab.”
Boardman said raggedly, “If it’ll make you feel better, Dick, kill me. And then go aboard the ship and do what we want you to do. I’m expendable.”
“I almost think you mean that,” Muller said wonderingly. “You crafty old bastard, you’re offering a trade. Your life for my cooperation! But where’s the quid pro quo? I don’t enjoy killing. It won’t soothe me at all to bum you down. I’ll still have my curse.”
“The offer stands.”
“Rejected,” Muller said. “If I kill you, it won’t be as part of any deal. But I’m much more likely to kill myself. You know, I’m a decent man at heart Somewhat unstable, yes, and who’s to blame me for that? But decent I’d rather use this gun on me than on you. I’m the one who’s suffering. I can end it.”
“You could have ended it at any time in the past nine years,” Boardman pointed out “But you survived. You devoted all your ingenuity to staying alive in this murderous place.”
“Ah. Yes. But that was different! An abstract challenge: man against the maze. But if I kill myself now, thwart you. I put the thumb to the nose with all of mankind watching. I’m the indispensable man, you say? What better way, then, to pay, mankind back for my pain?”
“We regretted your suffering,” said Boardman.
“I’m sure you wept bitterly for me. But that was all you did. You let me go creeping away, diseased, corrupt, unclean. Now comes the release. Not really suicide: revenge.” Muller smiled. He turned the gun to finest beam and let its muzzle rest against his chest. A touch of the finger, now. His eyes raked their faces. Rawlins looked deep in shock. Only Boardman was animated with concern and fright. “I could kill you first, I suppose, Charles. As a lesson to our young friend: the wages of deceit is death. But no. That would spoil everything. You have to live, Charles. To go back to Earth and admit that you let the indispensable man slip through your grasp. What a blotch on your career!”
His finger tightened on the stud. “Now,” he said. “Quickly.”
“No!” Boardman screamed. “For the love of—”
“Man,” said Muller, and laughed, and did not fire. His arm relaxed. He tossed the weapon contemptuously toward Boardman. It landed almost at his feet.
“Foam!” Boardman cried. “Quick!”
“Don’t bother,” said Muller. “I’m yours.”
XVII
Feeling that he was in disgrace, Rawlins kept away from the others on the nearly silent outward march. He considered his career in ruins. He had jeopardized the lives of his companions and the success of the mission. Yet it had been worth it, he felt. A time comes when a man takes his stand against what he believes to be wrong.
The simple moral pleasure that he took in that was balanced and overbalanced by the knowledge that he had acted naively, romantically, foolishly. He could not bear to face Boardman now. He thought more than once of letting one of the deadly traps of these outer zones have him. But that too, he decided, would be naive, romantic, and foolish.
He watched Muller striding ahead, tall, proud, all tensions resolved, all doubts crystallized. And he wondered a thousand times why Muller had given back the gun.
Boardman finally explained it to him as they camped for the night in a precarious plaza near the outward side of Zone G.
“Look at me,” Boardman said. “What’s the matter? Why can’t you look at me?”
“Don’t toy with me, Charles. Get it over with. The tongue-lashing. The sentence.”
“It’s all right, Ned. You helped us get what we wanted. Why should I be angry?”
“But the gun—I gave him the gun—”
“Confusion of ends and means again. He’s coming with us. He’s doing what we wanted him to do. That’s what counts.”
Floundering, Rawlins said, “And if he had killed himself? Or us?”
“He wouldn’t have done either.”
“You can say that, now. But for the first moment, when he held the gun—”
“No,” Boardman said. “I told you earlier: we’d work on his sense of honor. Which we had to reawaken. You did that. Look, here I am, the brutal agent of a brutal and amoral society, right? And I confirm all of Muller’s worst thoughts about mankind. Why should he help a tribe of wolves? And here you are: young and innocent, full of hope and dreams. You remind him of the mankind he once served, before the cynicism corroded him. You demonstrate sympathy, love for a fellow man, the willingness to make a dramatic gesture for the sake of righteousness. You show Muller that there’s small hope in humanity. See? You defy me and give him a gun and make him master of the situation. He could do the obvious and bum us down. He could do the slightly less obvious, and bum himself. Or he could match your gesture with one of his own, top it, commit a deliberate act of renunciation, express his revived sense of moral superiority. He does it. He tosses away the gun. You were vital, Ned. You were the instrument through which we won him.”
Rawlins said, “You make it sound so ugly when you spell it out that way. As if you had planned even this.”
Boardman smiled.
“Did you?” Rawlins demanded suddenly. “No. You couldn’t have calculated all those twists and turns. Now, after the fact, you’re trying to claim credit for having engineered it all. But I saw yon in the moment I handed him the gun. There was fear on your face, and anger. You weren’t at all sure what he was going to do. Only when everything worked out could you claim it went according to plan. I can see right through you, Charles!”
“How delightful to be transparent,” Boardman said gaily.
Carefully they traced their outward path, but they met few challenges and no serious dangers. Quickly they went toward the ship.
They gave Muller a forward cabin, well apart from the quarters of the crew. He was withdrawn, subdued, self-contained; an ironic smile often played on his lips, and his eyes displayed a glint of contempt much of the time. But he was willing to do as they directed. He had had his moment of supremacy; now he was theirs.
Hosteen and his men bustled through the liftoff preparations. Muller remained in his cabin. Boardman went to him, alone, unarmed. He could make noble gestures too.
They faced each other across a low table. Muller waited, silent, his face cleansed of emotion. Boardman said after a long moment, “I’m grateful to you, Dick.”
“Save it.”
“I don’t mind if you despise me. I did what I had to do. So did the boy. And now so will you.”
He sat quite close to Muller. The emanation hit him broadside, but he deliberately remained in place. That wave of despair welling out to him made him feel a thousand years old. The decay of the body, the crumbling of the soul, the heat-death of the galaxy . . . the coming of winter . . . emptiness . . . ashes . . .
“When we reach Earth,” said Boardman crisply. “I’ll put you through a detailed briefing. You’ll come out of it knowing as much about the radio people as we do, which isn’t saying a great deal. After that you’ll be on your own. Is there anyone you’d like me to have waiting for you when we dock Earthside?”
“No.”
“I can send word ahead. There are people who’ve never stopped loving you, Dick. They’ll be there if I ask them.”
Muller said slowly, “I see the strain in your eyes, Charles. You feel the nearness of me, and it’s ripping you apart. You feel it in your gut In your forehead. Back of your breastbone. Your face is going gray. Your cheeks are sagging. You’ll sit here if it kills you, yes, because that’s your style, but it’s hell for you. If there’s anyone on Earth who never stopped loving me, Charles, the least I can do is spare her from hell. I don’t want to meet anyone. I don’t want to see anyone. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
“As you wish,” said Boardman. Beads of sweat hung from his bushy brows and dropped to his cheeks. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind when you’re close to Earth.”
“I’ll never be close to Earth again,” Muller said.
XVIII
He spent three weeks absorbing all that was known of the giant extragalactic beings. They gave him quarters in a bunker on Luna and he lived quietly beneath Copernicus, moving like a robot through steely gray corridors lit by warm glowing torches. They showed him all the cubes. They ran off a variety of reconstructs in every sensory mode. Muller listened. He absorbed. He said very little.
They kept well away from him, as they had on the voyage from Lemnos. Whole days passed in which he saw no human being. When they came to him, they remained at distances of ten meters and more.
The exception was Boardman, who visited him three times a week, and made a point always of coming well within the pain range. Muller found that contemptible. Boardman seemed to be patronizing him with this voluntary and wholly unnecessary submission to discomfort “I wish you’d keep away,” Midler said to him on the fifth visit. “We can talk by screen. Or you could stay by the door.”
“I don’t mind the close contact.”
“I do,” said Muller. “Has it ever occurred to you that I’ve begun to. find mankind as odious as mankind finds me? The reek of your meaty body, Charles—it goes into my nostrils like a spike. Not just you, all the others. Sickening. Hideous. Even the look of your faces. The pores. The stupid gaping mouths. The ears. Look at a human ear closely some time, Charles. Have you ever seen anything more repulsive than that pink wrinkled cup? You all disgust me!”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Boardman said.
The briefing went on and on. Muller was ready after the first week to undertake his assignment but no, they had to feed him all the data in the bank, first. He absorbed the information with twitchy impatience. A shadow of his old self remained to find it fascinating, a challenge worth accepting. He would go. He would serve as before. He would honor his obligation.
At last they said he could depart.
From Luna they took him by ion-drive to a point outside the orbit of Mars, where they transferred him to a warp-drive ship already programmed to kick him to the edge of the galaxy. Alone.
From the cabin of his small sleek ship he watched the technicians drifting in space, getting ready to sever the transfer line. Then they were returning to their own ship. Now he heard from Boardman, a final message, a Boardman special, inspirational, go forth and do your duty for mankind, et cetera, et cetera. Muller thanked him graciously for his words.
The communications channel was cut.
Moments later Muller entered warp.
The aliens had taken possession of three solar systems on the fringes of the galactic lens, each star having two Earth-settled planets. Muller’s ship was aimed at a greenish-gold star whose worlds had been colonized only forty years before. The fifth planet, dry as iron, belonged to a Central Asian colonization society that was trying to establish a series of pastoral cultures where nomad virtues could be practiced. The sixth, with a more typically Earthlike mixture of climates and environments, was occupied by representatives of half a dozen colonization societies, each on its own continent. The relations between these groups, often intricate and touchy, had ceased to matter within the past twelve months, for both planets now were under control of extragalactic overseers.
Muller emerged from warp twenty light-seconds from the sixth planet His ship automatically went into an observation orbit, and the scanners began to report. Screens showed him the surface picture; via template overlay he was able to compare the configurations of the outposts below with the pattern as it had been prior to the alien conquest. The amplified images were quite interesting. The original settlements appeared on his screen in violet, and the recent extensions in red; Muller observed that about each of the colonies, regardless of its original ground plan, there had sprouted a network of angular streets and jagged avenues. Instinctively he recognized the geometries as alien.
In orbit, seven thousand kilometers above the sixth planet, was a glistening capsule, slightly longer on one axis than on the other, which had about the mass of a large interstellar transport ship. Muller found a similar capsule in orbit about the fifth world. The overseers.
It was impossible for him to open communications with either of these capsules, or with the planets beyond. All channels were blocked. He twisted dials fitfully for more than an hour, ignoring the irritable responses of the ship’s brain, which kept telling him to give up the idea. At last he conceded.
He brought his ship close to the nearer orbiting capsule. To his surprise the ship remained under his control. Destructive missiles that had come this close to alien overseers had been commandeered; but he was able to navigate. A hopeful sign? Was he under scan, and was the alien able to distinguish him from a hostile weapon? Or was he being ignored?
At a distance of one million kilometers he matched velocities with the alien satellite and put his ship in a parking orbit around it He entered his drop-capsule. He ejected himself and slid from his ship into darkness.
Now the alien seized him. There was no doubt. The drop-capsule was programmed for a minimum-expenditure orbit that would bring it skimming past the alien in due time, but Muller swiftly discovered that he was deviating from that orbit. Deviations are never accidental. His capsule was accelerating beyond the program, which meant that it had been grasped and was being drawn forward. He accepted that. He was idly calm, expecting nothing and prepared for everything. The drop-capsule eased down. He saw the gleaming bulk of the alien satellite show.
Skin to metal skin, the vehicles met and touched and joined. A hatch slid open.
He drifted within.
His capsule came to rest on a broad platform in an immense cavernous room hundreds of meters long, highland broad. Fully suited, Muller stepped from it. He activated his gravity pads; for, as he anticipated, gravity in here was so dose to null that the pull was imperceptible. In the blackness he saw only a faint purplish glow. Against a backdrop of utter silence he heard a resonant booming sound, like an enormously amplified sigh, shuddering through the struts and trusses of the satellite. Despite his gravity pads he felt dizzy; beneath him the floor rolled. Through his mind went a sensation like the throbbing of the sea; great waves slammed ragged beaches; a mass of water stirred and groaned in its global cavity; the world shivered beneath the burden. Muller felt a chill that his suit could not counteract. An irresistible force drew him. Hesitantly he moved, relieved and surprised to see that his limbs still obeyed his commands, though he was not entirely their master. The awareness of something vast nearby, something heaving and pulsating and sighing, remained with him.
He walked down a night-drowned boulevard. He came to a low railing, a dull red line against the deep darkness, and pressed his leg against it, keeping contact with it as he moved forward. At one point he slipped and hit the railing with his elbow and heard the clang of metal traveling through the entire structure. Blurred echoes drifted back to him. As though walking the maze he passed through corridors and hatches, across interlocking compartments, over bridges that spanned dark abysses, down sloping ramplike debouchments into lofty chambers whose ceilings were dimly visible. Here he moved in blind confidence, fearing nothing. He could barely see. He had no vision of the total structure of this satellite. He could scarcely imagine the purpose of these inner partitions.
From that hidden giant presence came silent waves; an ever-intensifying pressure. He trembled in its grip.
Still he moved on, until now he was in some central gallery, and by a thin blue glow he was able to discern levels dwindling below him, and far beneath his balcony a broad tank, and within the tank something sparkling, something huge.
“Here I am,” he said. “Richard Muller. Earthman.”
He gripped the railing and peered downward. Did the great beast stir and shift? Did it grunt? Did it call to him in a language he understood? He heard nothing. But he felt a great deal.
He felt his soul escaping through his pores.
The drain was unrelenting. Down in the pit the monster tapped his spirit, opened petcocks of neural energy, drew forth, demanded more, drew that too.
“Go on,” Muller said, and the echoes of his voice danced around him. “Drink! What’s it like? A bitter brew? Drink!”
His knees buckled. He sagged forward. He pressed his forehead to the cold railing. He yielded himself in glittering droplets. He gave up first love and first disappointment, April rain, fever and ache, pride and hope, the scent of sweat and the touch of flesh, warmth and cold, sweet and sour, the thunder of music, the music of thunder, silken hair knotted between his fingers, lines scratched in spongy soil, snorting stallions, glittering schools of tiny fish, the towers of Newer Chicago, the brothels of Under New Orleans, know, milk, wine, hunger, fire, pain, sleep, sorrow, apples, dawn, tears, Bach, sibling grease, the laughter of old men, the sun on the horizon, the moon on the sea, ecstasy, grief, salt, artichokes, green fields, the light of other stars, soft thighs, whirling dancers, vision cubes, transportation pods, cold gin, crumbling books, Sunday mornings, the fumes of rocket fuel, summer flowers on a glacier’s flank, and much more. He gave it all. He waited for an answer, and none came to him, and when be was wholly empty he lay face downward, drained, hollow, staring blindly into the abyss.
Rawlins, who had been standing as though in a trance, burst into sudden activity. He darted forward, seized Reynold’s gun from its holster, ran toward Muller and pressed the weapon into his hand. “There,” he said thickly. “Now you’re in charge.”
Muller studied the gun as though he had never seen one before, but his surprise lasted only a fraction of a second. He slipped his hand around its comfortable butt and fingered the firing stud. It was a familiar model, only slightly changed from the ones he had known. In a quick flaring burst he could kill them all. Or himself.
He stepped back so they could not come upon him from the rear. Then he moved the gun in an arc of some 270 degrees, taking them all in.
“Stand close together,” he said. “The six of you. Stand one meter apart in a straight row and keep your hands out where I can see them at all times.”
He enjoyed the black glowering look that Boardman threw at Ned Rawlins. The boy seemed dazed, flushed, confused, a figure in a dream. Muller waited patiently as the six men arranged themselves according to his orders. He was surprised at his own calmness.
“You look unhappy, Charles,” he said. “How old are you now, eighty years? You’d like to live that other seventy, eighty, ninety, I guess. You have your career planned, and the plan doesn’t include dying on Lemnos. Stand still, Charles. And stand straight. You won’t win any pity from me by trying to look old and sagging. I know that dodge. You’re as healthy as I am, beneath the phony flab.”
Boardman said raggedly, “If it’ll make you feel better, Dick, kill me. And then go aboard the ship and do what we want you to do. I’m expendable.”
“I almost think you mean that,” Muller said wonderingly. “You crafty old bastard, you’re offering a trade. Your life for my cooperation! But where’s the quid pro quo? I don’t enjoy killing. It won’t soothe me at all to bum you down. I’ll still have my curse.”
“The offer stands.”
“Rejected,” Muller said. “If I kill you, it won’t be as part of any deal. But I’m much more likely to kill myself. You know, I’m a decent man at heart Somewhat unstable, yes, and who’s to blame me for that? But decent I’d rather use this gun on me than on you. I’m the one who’s suffering. I can end it.”
“You could have ended it at any time in the past nine years,” Boardman pointed out “But you survived. You devoted all your ingenuity to staying alive in this murderous place.”
“Ah. Yes. But that was different! An abstract challenge: man against the maze. But if I kill myself now, thwart you. I put the thumb to the nose with all of mankind watching. I’m the indispensable man, you say? What better way, then, to pay, mankind back for my pain?”
“We regretted your suffering,” said Boardman.
“I’m sure you wept bitterly for me. But that was all you did. You let me go creeping away, diseased, corrupt, unclean. Now comes the release. Not really suicide: revenge.” Muller smiled. He turned the gun to finest beam and let its muzzle rest against his chest. A touch of the finger, now. His eyes raked their faces. Rawlins looked deep in shock. Only Boardman was animated with concern and fright. “I could kill you first, I suppose, Charles. As a lesson to our young friend: the wages of deceit is death. But no. That would spoil everything. You have to live, Charles. To go back to Earth and admit that you let the indispensable man slip through your grasp. What a blotch on your career!”
His finger tightened on the stud. “Now,” he said. “Quickly.”
“No!” Boardman screamed. “For the love of—”
“Man,” said Muller, and laughed, and did not fire. His arm relaxed. He tossed the weapon contemptuously toward Boardman. It landed almost at his feet.
“Foam!” Boardman cried. “Quick!”
“Don’t bother,” said Muller. “I’m yours.”
XVII
Feeling that he was in disgrace, Rawlins kept away from the others on the nearly silent outward march. He considered his career in ruins. He had jeopardized the lives of his companions and the success of the mission. Yet it had been worth it, he felt. A time comes when a man takes his stand against what he believes to be wrong.
The simple moral pleasure that he took in that was balanced and overbalanced by the knowledge that he had acted naively, romantically, foolishly. He could not bear to face Boardman now. He thought more than once of letting one of the deadly traps of these outer zones have him. But that too, he decided, would be naive, romantic, and foolish.
He watched Muller striding ahead, tall, proud, all tensions resolved, all doubts crystallized. And he wondered a thousand times why Muller had given back the gun.
Boardman finally explained it to him as they camped for the night in a precarious plaza near the outward side of Zone G.
“Look at me,” Boardman said. “What’s the matter? Why can’t you look at me?”
“Don’t toy with me, Charles. Get it over with. The tongue-lashing. The sentence.”
“It’s all right, Ned. You helped us get what we wanted. Why should I be angry?”
“But the gun—I gave him the gun—”
“Confusion of ends and means again. He’s coming with us. He’s doing what we wanted him to do. That’s what counts.”
Floundering, Rawlins said, “And if he had killed himself? Or us?”
“He wouldn’t have done either.”
“You can say that, now. But for the first moment, when he held the gun—”
“No,” Boardman said. “I told you earlier: we’d work on his sense of honor. Which we had to reawaken. You did that. Look, here I am, the brutal agent of a brutal and amoral society, right? And I confirm all of Muller’s worst thoughts about mankind. Why should he help a tribe of wolves? And here you are: young and innocent, full of hope and dreams. You remind him of the mankind he once served, before the cynicism corroded him. You demonstrate sympathy, love for a fellow man, the willingness to make a dramatic gesture for the sake of righteousness. You show Muller that there’s small hope in humanity. See? You defy me and give him a gun and make him master of the situation. He could do the obvious and bum us down. He could do the slightly less obvious, and bum himself. Or he could match your gesture with one of his own, top it, commit a deliberate act of renunciation, express his revived sense of moral superiority. He does it. He tosses away the gun. You were vital, Ned. You were the instrument through which we won him.”
Rawlins said, “You make it sound so ugly when you spell it out that way. As if you had planned even this.”
Boardman smiled.
“Did you?” Rawlins demanded suddenly. “No. You couldn’t have calculated all those twists and turns. Now, after the fact, you’re trying to claim credit for having engineered it all. But I saw yon in the moment I handed him the gun. There was fear on your face, and anger. You weren’t at all sure what he was going to do. Only when everything worked out could you claim it went according to plan. I can see right through you, Charles!”
“How delightful to be transparent,” Boardman said gaily.
Carefully they traced their outward path, but they met few challenges and no serious dangers. Quickly they went toward the ship.
They gave Muller a forward cabin, well apart from the quarters of the crew. He was withdrawn, subdued, self-contained; an ironic smile often played on his lips, and his eyes displayed a glint of contempt much of the time. But he was willing to do as they directed. He had had his moment of supremacy; now he was theirs.
Hosteen and his men bustled through the liftoff preparations. Muller remained in his cabin. Boardman went to him, alone, unarmed. He could make noble gestures too.
They faced each other across a low table. Muller waited, silent, his face cleansed of emotion. Boardman said after a long moment, “I’m grateful to you, Dick.”
“Save it.”
“I don’t mind if you despise me. I did what I had to do. So did the boy. And now so will you.”
He sat quite close to Muller. The emanation hit him broadside, but he deliberately remained in place. That wave of despair welling out to him made him feel a thousand years old. The decay of the body, the crumbling of the soul, the heat-death of the galaxy . . . the coming of winter . . . emptiness . . . ashes . . .
“When we reach Earth,” said Boardman crisply. “I’ll put you through a detailed briefing. You’ll come out of it knowing as much about the radio people as we do, which isn’t saying a great deal. After that you’ll be on your own. Is there anyone you’d like me to have waiting for you when we dock Earthside?”
“No.”
“I can send word ahead. There are people who’ve never stopped loving you, Dick. They’ll be there if I ask them.”
Muller said slowly, “I see the strain in your eyes, Charles. You feel the nearness of me, and it’s ripping you apart. You feel it in your gut In your forehead. Back of your breastbone. Your face is going gray. Your cheeks are sagging. You’ll sit here if it kills you, yes, because that’s your style, but it’s hell for you. If there’s anyone on Earth who never stopped loving me, Charles, the least I can do is spare her from hell. I don’t want to meet anyone. I don’t want to see anyone. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
“As you wish,” said Boardman. Beads of sweat hung from his bushy brows and dropped to his cheeks. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind when you’re close to Earth.”
“I’ll never be close to Earth again,” Muller said.
XVIII
He spent three weeks absorbing all that was known of the giant extragalactic beings. They gave him quarters in a bunker on Luna and he lived quietly beneath Copernicus, moving like a robot through steely gray corridors lit by warm glowing torches. They showed him all the cubes. They ran off a variety of reconstructs in every sensory mode. Muller listened. He absorbed. He said very little.
They kept well away from him, as they had on the voyage from Lemnos. Whole days passed in which he saw no human being. When they came to him, they remained at distances of ten meters and more.
The exception was Boardman, who visited him three times a week, and made a point always of coming well within the pain range. Muller found that contemptible. Boardman seemed to be patronizing him with this voluntary and wholly unnecessary submission to discomfort “I wish you’d keep away,” Midler said to him on the fifth visit. “We can talk by screen. Or you could stay by the door.”
“I don’t mind the close contact.”
“I do,” said Muller. “Has it ever occurred to you that I’ve begun to. find mankind as odious as mankind finds me? The reek of your meaty body, Charles—it goes into my nostrils like a spike. Not just you, all the others. Sickening. Hideous. Even the look of your faces. The pores. The stupid gaping mouths. The ears. Look at a human ear closely some time, Charles. Have you ever seen anything more repulsive than that pink wrinkled cup? You all disgust me!”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Boardman said.
The briefing went on and on. Muller was ready after the first week to undertake his assignment but no, they had to feed him all the data in the bank, first. He absorbed the information with twitchy impatience. A shadow of his old self remained to find it fascinating, a challenge worth accepting. He would go. He would serve as before. He would honor his obligation.
At last they said he could depart.
From Luna they took him by ion-drive to a point outside the orbit of Mars, where they transferred him to a warp-drive ship already programmed to kick him to the edge of the galaxy. Alone.
From the cabin of his small sleek ship he watched the technicians drifting in space, getting ready to sever the transfer line. Then they were returning to their own ship. Now he heard from Boardman, a final message, a Boardman special, inspirational, go forth and do your duty for mankind, et cetera, et cetera. Muller thanked him graciously for his words.
The communications channel was cut.
Moments later Muller entered warp.
The aliens had taken possession of three solar systems on the fringes of the galactic lens, each star having two Earth-settled planets. Muller’s ship was aimed at a greenish-gold star whose worlds had been colonized only forty years before. The fifth planet, dry as iron, belonged to a Central Asian colonization society that was trying to establish a series of pastoral cultures where nomad virtues could be practiced. The sixth, with a more typically Earthlike mixture of climates and environments, was occupied by representatives of half a dozen colonization societies, each on its own continent. The relations between these groups, often intricate and touchy, had ceased to matter within the past twelve months, for both planets now were under control of extragalactic overseers.
Muller emerged from warp twenty light-seconds from the sixth planet His ship automatically went into an observation orbit, and the scanners began to report. Screens showed him the surface picture; via template overlay he was able to compare the configurations of the outposts below with the pattern as it had been prior to the alien conquest. The amplified images were quite interesting. The original settlements appeared on his screen in violet, and the recent extensions in red; Muller observed that about each of the colonies, regardless of its original ground plan, there had sprouted a network of angular streets and jagged avenues. Instinctively he recognized the geometries as alien.
In orbit, seven thousand kilometers above the sixth planet, was a glistening capsule, slightly longer on one axis than on the other, which had about the mass of a large interstellar transport ship. Muller found a similar capsule in orbit about the fifth world. The overseers.
It was impossible for him to open communications with either of these capsules, or with the planets beyond. All channels were blocked. He twisted dials fitfully for more than an hour, ignoring the irritable responses of the ship’s brain, which kept telling him to give up the idea. At last he conceded.
He brought his ship close to the nearer orbiting capsule. To his surprise the ship remained under his control. Destructive missiles that had come this close to alien overseers had been commandeered; but he was able to navigate. A hopeful sign? Was he under scan, and was the alien able to distinguish him from a hostile weapon? Or was he being ignored?
At a distance of one million kilometers he matched velocities with the alien satellite and put his ship in a parking orbit around it He entered his drop-capsule. He ejected himself and slid from his ship into darkness.
Now the alien seized him. There was no doubt. The drop-capsule was programmed for a minimum-expenditure orbit that would bring it skimming past the alien in due time, but Muller swiftly discovered that he was deviating from that orbit. Deviations are never accidental. His capsule was accelerating beyond the program, which meant that it had been grasped and was being drawn forward. He accepted that. He was idly calm, expecting nothing and prepared for everything. The drop-capsule eased down. He saw the gleaming bulk of the alien satellite show.
Skin to metal skin, the vehicles met and touched and joined. A hatch slid open.
He drifted within.
His capsule came to rest on a broad platform in an immense cavernous room hundreds of meters long, highland broad. Fully suited, Muller stepped from it. He activated his gravity pads; for, as he anticipated, gravity in here was so dose to null that the pull was imperceptible. In the blackness he saw only a faint purplish glow. Against a backdrop of utter silence he heard a resonant booming sound, like an enormously amplified sigh, shuddering through the struts and trusses of the satellite. Despite his gravity pads he felt dizzy; beneath him the floor rolled. Through his mind went a sensation like the throbbing of the sea; great waves slammed ragged beaches; a mass of water stirred and groaned in its global cavity; the world shivered beneath the burden. Muller felt a chill that his suit could not counteract. An irresistible force drew him. Hesitantly he moved, relieved and surprised to see that his limbs still obeyed his commands, though he was not entirely their master. The awareness of something vast nearby, something heaving and pulsating and sighing, remained with him.
He walked down a night-drowned boulevard. He came to a low railing, a dull red line against the deep darkness, and pressed his leg against it, keeping contact with it as he moved forward. At one point he slipped and hit the railing with his elbow and heard the clang of metal traveling through the entire structure. Blurred echoes drifted back to him. As though walking the maze he passed through corridors and hatches, across interlocking compartments, over bridges that spanned dark abysses, down sloping ramplike debouchments into lofty chambers whose ceilings were dimly visible. Here he moved in blind confidence, fearing nothing. He could barely see. He had no vision of the total structure of this satellite. He could scarcely imagine the purpose of these inner partitions.
From that hidden giant presence came silent waves; an ever-intensifying pressure. He trembled in its grip.
Still he moved on, until now he was in some central gallery, and by a thin blue glow he was able to discern levels dwindling below him, and far beneath his balcony a broad tank, and within the tank something sparkling, something huge.
“Here I am,” he said. “Richard Muller. Earthman.”
He gripped the railing and peered downward. Did the great beast stir and shift? Did it grunt? Did it call to him in a language he understood? He heard nothing. But he felt a great deal.
He felt his soul escaping through his pores.
The drain was unrelenting. Down in the pit the monster tapped his spirit, opened petcocks of neural energy, drew forth, demanded more, drew that too.
“Go on,” Muller said, and the echoes of his voice danced around him. “Drink! What’s it like? A bitter brew? Drink!”
His knees buckled. He sagged forward. He pressed his forehead to the cold railing. He yielded himself in glittering droplets. He gave up first love and first disappointment, April rain, fever and ache, pride and hope, the scent of sweat and the touch of flesh, warmth and cold, sweet and sour, the thunder of music, the music of thunder, silken hair knotted between his fingers, lines scratched in spongy soil, snorting stallions, glittering schools of tiny fish, the towers of Newer Chicago, the brothels of Under New Orleans, know, milk, wine, hunger, fire, pain, sleep, sorrow, apples, dawn, tears, Bach, sibling grease, the laughter of old men, the sun on the horizon, the moon on the sea, ecstasy, grief, salt, artichokes, green fields, the light of other stars, soft thighs, whirling dancers, vision cubes, transportation pods, cold gin, crumbling books, Sunday mornings, the fumes of rocket fuel, summer flowers on a glacier’s flank, and much more. He gave it all. He waited for an answer, and none came to him, and when be was wholly empty he lay face downward, drained, hollow, staring blindly into the abyss.
