“I’m listening.”

  “We left here as unwelcome guests on Scabbard’s ugly tub, thanks to your peculiar sense of your duty to the Legion.” His nasal whine lifted resentfully. “Scabbard’s crew of hairy cavemen were all cursing Nowhere—whatever that is. The geodynes were stalled and half the instruments were dead. We were still on rocket astrogation, eight hours out, when we picked up a laserphone signal.”

  “You did?” Glancing up at the girl, I found her eyes upon me, darkly intense, yet queerly serene. “Laserphones don’t function well in the anomaly.”

  “A call from Commander Ken Star—we told you he was coming!” His dun-colored eyes rolled triumphantly at me. “When you hear about that call, you’ll let us in your precious station. You’ll thank us for coming back, and keep us safe while you send help to Ken.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “Let’s hear about the call.”

  “I don’t trust people,” old Habibula wheezed. “That’s why I took a mortal risk to bug Scabbard’s cabin and the laser room, so that I could eavesdrop on the ship’s phone. That’s how I heard the signal.”

  His slaty eyes rolled at me.

  “The call came on the distress channel,” he panted. “Faint and fading, but the laserman pieced it together. Commander Star was on the laserphone himself. Said he was headed here on the Quasar Quest—just like we told you.”

  He paused to puff, squinting as if judging my reaction.

  “But the survey ship’s in trouble,” he wheezed again. “Caught in the spreading anomaly. Space-drive out. Rockets dead. Drifting into Nowhere. Commander Star was calling for help, but he got none from Scabbard.”

  Old Habibula must have seen my unbelief, because his smooth moon face grew pinker.

  “We’re telling you the blessed truth.” His hollow voice lifted belligerently. “Scabbard was scared—maybe he ain’t as tough as he looks. He’d been drinking, but he took the laserphone. He replied that we were already too near Nowhere. Our own geodynes were stalled. We had no rocket fuel to spare. He said he’d report the call, if we got back to sector base. But he refused to render aid.”

  Old Habibula stiffened defiantly.

  “That’s why we left his stinking ship. I conferred with Lil. We knew you’d want to help Commander Star, and now we’ve come to bring his distress message to you.”

  His dust-colored eyes blinked alertly at me.

  “Ain’t that enough to satisfy you?” he whined impatiently. “Now will you let us inside your precious station?”

  “Not yet.” I stood frowning doubtfully. “Why did Scabbard let you leave his ship?”

  “He didn’t.” Old Habibula grinned. “He’d got too drunk to care. I told you I’ve a certain craft with locks, and Lil can be persuasive. We gathered up our cargo, and

  commandeered the escape capsule, and left Scabbard sleeping.” He drew a rasping breath. “Now you’ve got to let us in—and send help to poor Ken Star!”

  “If all this is just a hoax, it’s a pretty clumsy one,” I exploded. “A liar ought to do better. I don’t know what to believe—but hi any case we have no ships or men left to waste on rescue attempts.”

  “Please, Captain Ulnar.” The girl spoke from the capsule, her vibrant voice urgent, yet queerly serene. “If you do hope to escape the shame of the Purple Hall, we have brought your chance. You must take us hi!”

  I stood for a second looking at her. Spotless in white, bronze eyes intensely dark, she looked aloof and cool and alluring. At any other place, at any other time, she might have stirred me. On Nowhere Near, however, with that anomaly growing around us, I couldn’t afford to let her become anything more than another baffling factor in a problem that promised no solution.

  “I’ll take you in,” I told her. “But I’ll have to make a search for weapons or any kind of contraband. Get out of the capsule.”

  “You’ll find no weapons,” old Habibula huffed. “Nor contraband, neither.” His muddy eyes rolled toward the lock sergeant behind me. “Like I told that insolent pup, my cargo is my own blessed business.”

  “Quiet, Giles!” the girl called softly.

  Sullenly quiet, old Habibula held up his hands while I prodded his flaming sweater and his sagging pants. The hard lump in his right pocket turned out to be a leather-padded blackjack. The left pocket gave up a ring of keys, a rusted nail, a twist of steel wire, a worn pair of brass knuckles, but nothing more deadly.

  When I looked at the girl, she jumped from the capsule. Flying like a white bird in the low-G field, she alighted on the deck and turned before me, lean arms lifted, waiting to be searched. Light flashed white on her platinum ring, glowed cold on that small black skull.

  Somehow I could not touch her, but I saw no unnatural bulge. Leaving the sergeant to guard them, I scrambled into the capsule. Old Habibula’s plaintive whine came after me.

  “When you reach my precious cargo, remember our desperate experiment. Remember Lilith’s precious serum. Remember all the years we’ll need, to prove I really am immortal. We have come supplied.”

  Stooping in the narrow capsule, I inspected his cargo. I had been prepared for the loot of some crime as fantastic as his tale of immortality. I was prepared for smuggled weapons—perhaps for a plot to seize the station for a base of Scabbard’s pirates. I was even prepared to find medical equipment and supplies for a legitimate longevity experiment.

  What I found was caviar and wine.

  “A mortal small reward for all my desperate years of service with the Legion,” his plaintive wail followed me. “But don’t you doubt it’s real! The best black caviar, packed in permachill for interstellar shipment all the way from Earth—every can cost

  a fearful fortune. Selected wines from old Earth—the choicest vintages of the last hundred years. Don’t you damage it, in some fool search for stolen jewels or nuclear devices!”

  That odd cargo, more than old Habibula’s unlikely tale of that distress message from the Quasar Quest, more than the remote and lovely desperation of the girl herself, made up my mind. Though few retired corporals are pensioned off on caviar and wine, those heavy crates fitted no pattern of danger to the station that I could perceive.

  “I’m accepting you as guests, not as prisoners,” I told them. “But only on a temporary basis. Your status depends on how you behave, and on the truth of what you’ve told me, and on what else happens out in Nowhere.”

  “Thank you, Lars Ulnar!” The girl’s quiet voice brought a lump to my throat. “You’ll be glad you trusted us.”

  I gave them quarters out in the full-G ring, programmed the station computer to issue their rations and supplies, and asked the lock sergeant to look after their cargo. By that time Ketzler, the watch officer, was buzzing me.

  The anomaly was still spreading around us, he reported. The disturbance at its heart had never been more violent. The intense magnetic flux had wrecked our best magnetometer. Reports of increasing gravitic drift were disturbing the men.

  Ketzler was beardless and solemn, even younger than I. A loyal junior officer, he had been patiently in training for the time when our rotation plan would let him take my place, but now this crisis began to erode his half-learned authority. Even on the intercom, I could hear the tremor in his voice.

  “I’m afraid—afraid of trouble with the men, sir. Especially those old hands whose leave we had to deny. I’ve heard some ugly talk.”

  “I know they’re bitter,” I admitted. “But I’m not afraid of them.”

  I spent the rest of the watch checking instrument readings and doing what I could to bolster morale. After all, I told Ketzler, there wasn’t much the men could gain by mutiny. The Erewhon was gone. Our emergency craft, though mutineers might seize them, were none of them fit for the long voyage out to any inhabited planet. Even though the station was drifting toward Nowhere, we were all safer inside than out.

  Haunted by old Habibula’s tale about that call from Commander Star, I had the duty crew probe the region north of Nowhere with every available instrument. They picked up nothing, yet I knew the search was inconclusive. The raging interference was violent enough to drown any possible laser or radio signal.

  Because I had to present a confident appearance, as much as for any other reason, I called Lilith Adams to ask her and old Habibula to meet me in the mess hall for dinner.

  “Delighted!” Her cool voice was oddly calm, yet oddly tense. “Captain, could you show us the station, too? And tell us more about the anomaly and this new disturbance? We’ve heard some alarming rumors.”

  The truth would be more alarming than the rumors, but I didn’t tell her that. I did

  agree to take them around the station before dinner—for at least two reasons. I wanted to show the crew an air of duty-as-usual. I wanted more clues to the riddle of our uninvited guests. Perhaps I also wanted to please the girl.

  Methodically building an image of steadfast calm, I took time for a shower and a shave before I went to pick up our guests. Brushing the dust off my best uniform, I caught myself whistling with anticipation.

  On the way to meet them, I stopped at the control center. The desperate tension there almost cracked my image of sure authority. Ketzler was still on duty with the new watch, though he should have been in bed.

  The center was a big, drum-shaped room, buried at the heart of the ice asteroid. It spun slowly on its own axis, so that the rim of the drum was an endless floor. One round end was a projection screen for our electronic telescopes; the other held the electronic chart where the computer integrated all the instrument readings to make a visible map of Nowhere.

  I found Ketzler sitting rigid at the computer console, staring up at the shifting glow of the chart. It showed an ugly black-bellied creature, crouching at the center of a great web of shining lines that reached up and down all the way to the curving floor.

  The black belly of the creature was the heart of the anomaly, the region where all our instruments failed. Its spreading purple legs were the charted zones of anomalous gravitic force. The bright lines of the web were lines of magnetic force—already spread far beyond the tiny, bright green circle that marked the position of Nowhere Near.

  Ketzler jumped when I touched his shoulder.

  “How’s it going?” I ignored his nervous response. “Think it’s peaking out?”

  “Not yet, sir.” His glasses were pushed crooked on his haggard face, and they magnified his bloodshot eyes. “It’s the worst it has ever been—and still getting wilder. The gravitic drift has got me worried, sir.”

  He pushed a button that lit a curving row of bright yellow dots on the chart. The dots were numbered. Each one showed a charted past position of Nowhere Near. They marked the trail the drifting station had followed, always closer to that creature’s belly.

  “It’s sucking us right in.” He looked at me cross-eyed through the sweat-smeared glasses. “Even with our position-rockets going full thrust. We can’t control the drift, sir.”

  “We’ve done all we can,” I assured him. “If something does happen, I’ll be at dinner—”

  Uneasily, he licked his dry lips.

  “Before you go, sir, we’ve a couple of things to report. That new iron asteroid we picked up north of Nowhere—it’s gone again!”

  He pointed to a red dot on the chart.

  “Another thing, sir—before you go to dinner.” I heard a dull echo of reproach in his hollow voice. “The laser monitors have just picked up what seems to be a distress signal from that same direction. No intelligible message, but we got what I think is part of the name of a ship. I think it was something Quest.”

  4 The Enemy Machine

  In spite of such disquieting developments, I tried to carry an air of hearty confidence. Of course the anomaly was dangerous, I reminded Ketzler. Its dangers were our business at Nowhere Near, and we were attending to them.

  However tired or frightened or resentful, the duty crews were still at work. Our undamaged instruments were still following what went on. The computer was still plotting. The position rockets were fighting at full thrust to keep us out of Nowhere.

  We could do no more.

  Even if Habibula’s unlikely tale was true, even if the Quasar Quest was fighting for her life against the half-known forces in the anomaly, there was no help we could give. Our lean resources were fully committed. If the cosmic menace of the anomaly had been ignored or underestimated, if our needs had been neglected, the errors had not been ours. We could not correct them now.

  Even to myself, I dared not admit that we were near a very desperate extremity. Shrugging off Ketzler’s anxious question, I advised him to get some rest and went on to keep my date with Lilith Adams and Giles Habibula.

  She had changed her severe white uniform for something blue and sheer, though she still wore that ugly, red-eyed skull. Even at full-G, her motion had the flowing grace of flight. She smiled and took my hand. Her touch lit rockets in me.

  “Captain Ulnar, you are very kind.”

  Her warm voice gave me a giddy feeling that the terrible disturbance of the anomaly had already swallowed me. She was walking at my side, alluring in that translucent blue, yet somehow out of reach. Excitingly near and real, she was yet somehow wrapped in that untouchable aloofness that I could not understand.

  “Giles has gone on to the mess hall for a snack before our tour,” she said. “Can we pick him up there?”

  A pang of jealous speculation stabbed me. If their queer tale was even partly true, if old Habibula was actually recovering his lost youth, it struck me that such a girl as Lilith Adams might be a more important part of the experiment than all his precious wine and caviar.

  We found him in the mess hall. Still appallingly unmilitary in the same blazing yellow sweater and the same shapeless fatigue pants, he was sitting at a table with our one remaining free companion, a plump redhead named Gina Lorth. They had split a bottle of his wine. He was acting younger than his age and as free as the companion.

  “Ready, Giles?”

  Showing no concern about the companion, Lilith had spoken in that cool tone of unconscious but absolute command that told me she was far more than nurse or

  playmate. Giles Habibula lurched to his feet, almost upsetting the startled redhead. Suddenly he was sober. His awed respect assured me that Lilith’s unknown role in this affair was something more than to prove his recovered youth.

  “For sweet life’s sake!” he wheezed. “Don’t shock me so.”

  “Come along, Giles. Captain Ulnar is going to show us over the station.”

  With a sad glance at the wine left in the bottle, he gave it to Gina and came puffing after us.

  “Lil’s precious serum!” His flat, bright, rock-colored eyes squinted at me craftily. “It’s giving back my youth, but at a fearful cost. Gnawing hunger and desperate thirst—and a yen I haven’t felt for fifty mortal years!”

  I showed them Nowhere Near.

  The station was a lean doughnut of inflated plastic and steel, just thick enough for rooms on both sides of a two-level corridor. It ringed a thousand-foot hall of interstellar ice—frozen water and methane and ammonia—that would have been a comet if it had ever drifted close enough to a star.

  That spinning doughnut made the rim of a half-mile wheel. The spokes were plastic tubes that held power lines and supply ducts and elevator shafts. The hubs were thick cylinders that projected from the poles of the ice asteroid. An inner slice of each cylinder, spinning slower than the spokes, was pierced for the valves that let ships enter the air docks. The outside end of each hub, driven with a counter-spin that kept it at null-G, held its telescopes and laser dome motionless with respect to the stars.

  Old Habibula appeared to enjoy the tour. His affection for machines seemed genuine. He lingered fondly about the atomic power plant shielded deep in the ice. He wanted to see the biosynthetic batteries that recycled our water and restored our air and produced the most of our food. He admired our intricate research gear. Somewhat to my surprise, he even seemed to understand it.

  “One question, Captain,” he wheezed at me. “You’re showing us a lot of lovely machines, modern as tomorrow. What I can’t quite see is the prehistoric design of the station itself. Why this spuming ring with its clumsy imitation of gravity, when you could have used gravitic inductors?”

  “Because of the anomaly,” I told him. “Space is different here— nobody knows precisely how or why. Gravitic and electric and optical devices don’t work well—you know what happened to the space-drive on Scabbard’s ship.”

  His earth-colored eyes blinked apprehensively.

  “What is this mortal anomaly?”

  “A spot in space where the common laws of nature don’t quite fit,” I said. “If you want the history of it—”

  “Let that wait till dinner, Giles,” Lilith put in gently. “I’d like to see the station first.”

  She still puzzled me. Though she didn’t claim to love machines, she seemed at home with them. Her quiet questions showed a keen brain, I thought, and a surprising

  technological background.

  We were just entering the observation dome at the north hub of the station, where the night of space came into the station itself, drowning the faint red glow of the instrument lights in icy midnight.

  We were in zero-G there, and I handed old Habibula and the girl little hand-jets. Both knew how to use them. Leaving Habibula admiring the gloomy forest of bulky instruments bolted to the inside wall, Lilith soared easily away toward the vast invisible curve of the transite dome that looked out toward Nowhere.

  “Captain Ulnar,” she called. “Come with me.”

  Soft and clear, her voice held that odd tone of sure command. Surprised at myself, I followed her silently. She had paused above the looming instruments, trim and small and perplexing against the vaster riddle of the anomaly.

  For a few moments she drifted there, looking out at the dust and mist of stars and the universal dark. Looking past her toward galactic north, I could see where a few stars were slightly blurred and reddened. Even that took a practised eye. The fearful shape of Nowhere revealed itself only to our special instruments. Yet something gave me a sudden queer feeling that she knew more about it than I did.

 

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