“Tell me something, Captain.” She turned quickly to me, her face grave and lovely in the cold starlight. “What is the atomic composition of this dome?”

  When I told her that it was a transite casting, it turned out she knew not only what transite was made of—she knew that the process of manufacture had been changed three times since that remarkable synthetic was first invented. She began to ask for precise technical specifications: date of manufacture, isotope analysis, index of refraction, density and curvature and thickness.

  Though such questions seemed trivial to me, her manner was deadly serious. Young then, I still had an excellent head for numbers. I had prepared myself carefully for the duties of that first command, and I was able to tell her promptly what she wanted to know.

  “Thank you, Captain.” Her lean, pleased smile set my head to spinning like the station. “Now we’d like to hear all about Nowhere.”

  As the hand-jets carried us in retreat from Nowhere and the star-frosted spatial night, back to the faint red glow of the instruments and the drifting bulk of old Habibula, I felt more than ever troubled by the riddle of our visitors. Though I was finding new facts, they fitted no pattern that I could understand.

  “We’ve heard rumors about this anomaly,” Lilith was saying. “It seems to be a dreadful thing—”

  “I ain’t afraid of it,” old Habibula puffed. “Not since I’ve seen all these fine machines. You can trust my judgment. I’ve a sense for danger, that has cost me mortal dear. And I ain’t afraid of Nowhere.”

  We were on our way back to the ring. Leaving the fan-jets in the rack, we caught D-grips on a moving cable. It lifted us through a cavernous hollow. It swung us above the dim-lit tanks and tangled pipes of the catalytic plant that converted the frozen

  gases of the asteroid into fuel for nuclear rockets and drinking water for us. It carried us flying above the massive metal bulge of the control drum, toward the main elevator.

  “Far and away, I’m the oldest veteran of the Legion,” old Habibula boasted. “In the bad old times, I’ve seen wicked perils that would blind your blessed eyes. I fought the mortal Medusae and the evil Cometeers and the monstrous Basilisk. But precious peace has come to the human system now. My trusty sense of danger finds no feel of peril here. I’ll put my faith in these machines—”

  The penetrating whine of my lapel intercom interrupted him.

  “Captain Ulnar!” Hoarse excitement rasped in Ketzler’s voice. “We’ve just got another fragmentary call from that ship in distress. The Quasar Quest. Commander Ken Star. And listen to this, sir!”

  Old Habibula and Lilith were flying ahead of me, clinging to the D-grips. When Ketzler paused, I heard the girl catch her breath, heard the old soldier’s wailing exclamation.

  “They’re under attack, sir!” Raw fear rasped hi Ketzler’s voice. “Something has followed them out of the anomaly. Some kind of enemy machine. A hundred tunes as big as the ship. Star says he’s disabled. He says the thing is gaining on him.

  “The last few words were interrupted, sir. But I interpret them to mean that Star has been forced to abandon ship.” Ketzler’s voice lifted toward the jagged brink of panic. “I thought you’d want to know at once, sir. What shall we do, sir?

  “What shall we do?”

  5 The Impossible Rocks

  For a moment I was busy with Ketzler. My first impulse was to reprimand him for that indiscreet intercom broadcast, which surely would damage station morale. Considering his extreme agitation, however, I let that wait.

  “Perhaps the message is a hoax.” I spoke with more conviction than I felt. “In any case, our duty is to carry on. Keep monitoring everything. Keep our guns manned. Keep me informed.”

  “Yes, sir.” His voice sounded very lonely. “We’ll carry on, sir.”

  Lilith Adams was flying upward two yards ahead of me through that shadowy space inside the ice asteroid. She swung on the D-grip to look back. Dimly lit from below, her face seemed gaunt and lovely and hurt.

  “Captain Ulnar, you’ve got to do something.” Her low voice was queerly, coldly calm. “We’ve got to help Commander Star.”

  “We’re doing all we can,” I told her. “After all, the station is not a battleship. We can’t run away. With only two obsolete proton guns, we can’t put up much of a fight. With all communication out, we can’t even call for aid.

  “If Commander Star is really under attack from an enemy machine—”

  A quavering wail came from old Habibula. His hands had slipped off the D-grip. Jerking convulsively in the flame-colored sweater, his body went sailing away through that dim cavern, whirling like a living satellite toward the far silver sphere of a rocket-fuel tank.

  “Help him, Captain.” The girl’s voice tightened with concern. “He isn’t used to enemy machines.”

  I triggered my hand-jet to overhaul him and tow him back to the cable. His pink skin had faded white, and I could feel his body trembling. He clutched the D-grip frantically.

  “Don’t speak of such machines!” His voice was a shrill, shallow piping. “But never think that I’m afraid. I’ve met and conquered dangers far more deadly than any space anomaly. It’s simply— simply—simply—”

  Clinging to the D-grip, he panted and shook.

  “It’s simply that I’m weak with mortal hunger and a thirst that won’t let go! I’m the hapless guinea pig, remember, for this desperate immortality experiment. Lilith’s precious serum has been turning back the years, but it gives me a fearful appetite.”

  “We’re on our way to dinner now.”

  From the cable stage, the elevator lifted us out to the full-G ring. We found the mess hall dark and empty, but old Habibula observed with a sick, pink grin that its faithful machines were ready to serve us. Greedily, he punched the computer for three full meals. While he was busy, Lilith beckoned me aside.

  “Captain—” Her hushed voice was gravely hesitant. “Aren’t we interfering with more important duty? At a time like this, shouldn’t you be in direct command?”

  I couldn’t tell her that she and old Habibula presented a problem as strange and dangerous as the anomaly itself.

  “Perhaps you don’t realize just how desperate this crisis is,” I told her carefully. “One wrong move could touch off panic. As things stand, the men are still on duty. Ketzler is a fine young officer. He needs a chance to prove himself.”

  Her tawny eyes looked hard at me.

  “Good enough, I guess.” She moved toward the table where Habibula sat waiting for his food. “If you’re really free, tell us about the anomaly.” Her face seemed oddly urgent. “Every fact you can!”

  “The first pioneers got here about thirty years ago,” I said. “They found this snowball and a little swarm of stranger rocks. Iron masses two or three miles across—a harder alloy than the nickel-iron of common meteors, and richly veined with more valuable metals.”

  “I’ve read reports about them.” Leaning over the little table, golden lights playing in her reddish hair, Lilith was listening as intently as if those queer asteroids were somehow as supremely important to her as they had become to me. “How many are there?”

  “That’s part of the puzzle,” I told her. “Even the number is anomalous. The Legion survey ship that made the first chart found five iron asteroids and three snowballs like this one. When the miners got here, four years later, they found only two snowballs, but six iron asteroids.”

  “So the survey team had made a mistake?”

  “Not likely. The miners had simply found the anomaly. They didn’t stay to watch it. The iron alloys were too tough for their drills —and then something happened to a loaded ore barge.”

  Giles Habibula started.

  “What’s that?” His mud-colored eyes rolled toward me. “What happened to the blessed barge?”

  “That’s part of the problem. It was a powerless ship, launched from one of those rocks with its load of metal and a miner’s family aboard. It sent back a queer laserphone message—something about the stars turning red. It never got to port, and no trace was found.”

  “Mortal me—”

  His gasping voice was interrupted by the arrival of three steaming cups of algae broth and three hot brown yeastcakes. He fell to eating, as eagerly as if the machines had served his own costly caviar.

  “Captain, please go on.” Lilith was oddly intense. “About the number of these asteroids—”

  “Five more years had passed before another colony of miners settled here,” I said. “They found only one ice asteroid—the one we’re on. But, at the time of their arrival, they charted nine iron asteroids.”

  Giles Habibula peered anxiously up at me, and hungrily back at his food.

  “These miners had brought improved atomic drills. They carved into those hard alloys and some of them struck rich pockets of platinum and gold. Space traders came. Even the men on this ice asteroid made fortunes selling water and rocket fuel and synthetic food. They built the original station. A roaring little metropolis—while it lasted.”

  Giles Habibula had stopped eating. He sat staring at me, a sick pallor on his round baby-face and a gray glaze dulling his rust-colored eyes.

  “So?” Lilith whispered quickly. “And—?”

  “They were building an industrial complex on Lodestone—as they called the largest iron asteroid. A barge terminal. A big atomic smelter. Shops for building and repairing mining machinery. A laserphone center for the whole swarm of rocks.

  “Then something happened.”

  “Whup?” Old Habibula spoke thickly around the unchewed yeastcake in his mouth, spraying crumbs. “Gulp?”

  “The laser beams were broken. All communication with the asteroid was cut off. An oxygen tanker had been dropping to land at the smelter. Its crew reported that the asteroid had reddened, flickered, and disappeared.”

  Old Habibula moved convulsively, overturning a bowl of broth. It flooded the end of the table and dripped on his knees.

  “That ended the mining,” I said. “Half the people and most of the wealth of the colony had been lost. The survivors scattered. Even this ice asteroid was abandoned, until the Legion came. Commander Ken Star set up the beacon—”

  “I know Ken Star.” A pink, slow smile warmed old Habibula’s round baby-face. “John’s younger son—I recall how he used to bring me toys to mend, long ago, when I was on guard duty at John’s great place on Phobos. My poor flesh freezes when I think of Ken out in the fearful anomaly now, fighting that enemy machine.

  “I love Ken Star—”

  “Captain, please go on,” Lilith’s anxious voice broke in. “Tell us every fact you can about the anomaly.”

  “Reports of the disappearing rocks got back to the Legion,” I said. “Ken Star came out with a survey ship to investigate them. A new iron asteroid popped out of Nowhere just ahead of him. He landed on it, and found the wreck of that missing ore barge.”

  Old Habibula had been mopping at the spilled broth with a fiber napkin. He froze again, his small eyes watching me with the flat bright blankness of two wet pebbles.

  “In life’s name!” he gasped. “Where had the blessed ore boat been?”

  “Nobody knows. Ken Star landed on the asteroid—his report is in the station files, but it doesn’t solve any mysteries. He found the bodies of the missing family, emaciated and frozen hard as iron. He found a diary the miner’s wife had started, but it makes no sense.”

  “What did she write?”

  “Most of it is commonplace. It begins with a bit of family history —she must have had forebodings of death, and she wanted her chil-dren to know who they were. Her son had been crippled in a mining accident; she was trying to get him to a surgeon. There’s a brief record of the flight—positions and velocities, tons of load, kilograms of water and food, tanks of oxygen full and used. The nonsense is in the last few entries.

  “Something had put out the stars—”

  Old Habibula gulped and neighed.

  “What mortal horror could put out the stars?”

  “The miner’s wife didn’t know. She was too busy trying to keep her family alive to write much more. But she writes that the barge is lost, drifting in the dark. She writes that they are searching the dark with the radar gear. She writes that they have picked up an object ahead. She writes that it’s approaching them, on a collision course. They

  are trying to signal, but they get no reply.

  “That’s the end of the diary. The barge had no rockets of its own. In his comments in the files, Ken Star concludes that the object was that iron asteroid. The collision killed the woman and her family. But Star doesn’t even guess where it happened—or what had put out the stars.

  “His own geodesic space-drive failed, soon after he left the wrecked barge on that iron asteroid. His landing rockets got him back to this snowball. He named it Nowhere Near and stayed here to watch the rocks while his first officer took the damaged ship out to a point where he could signal for relief.

  “When the relief ship came, Star went outside to get equipment for the beacons and the observatory. He found it hard to interest anybody—these odd rocks were less than specks of dust in the whole universe, and people had other problems to solve.

  “He had to use his friends in the Legion, but he got his equipment. The rock with the wrecked barge on it was gone again when he came back, but two others had appeared to take its place. He nudged this ice asteroid out of the middle of the anomaly— though not far enough to make it very safe. He installed the beacons and stayed here another year to watch Nowhere, before he went on to something else.

  “We’ve been here since—or the station has. This is my own fourth year. We keep the beacon burning. We chart those rocks as they come and go—there are nineteen, now. We monitor the instruments.

  “That’s the history of Nowhere Near.”

  Giles Habibula gulped the last bite of the last yeastcake, and blinked at me uneasily.

  “What effects do your instruments show?”

  “Optical,” I said. “Magnetic. Gravitic. All connected with those rocks that come and go. Observing stars at certain angles through the anomaly, we find their images blurred and spectral lines shifted toward the red. Whenever a rock appears or vanishes, our magnetometers record violent magnetic storms. The motions of the rocks themselves—and even of the station—show abnormal gravitic fields far more intense than their masses could create. The gravitic fields keep the swarm of rocks compact.

  “But I can’t explain any of those effects.”

  Old Habibula had drained the last drop of algae broth from the last of the bowls. He sat for a moment staring sadly at the greenish smear of spilled broth beyond his empty dishes.

  “That’s the dreadful shape of nature!” he wheezed abruptly. “That’s why I like machines. I don’t trust people, but mortal nature is by far the greater enemy. Worse than any faithless woman. Just when you think you know the rules, she amends ‘em. Those who say nature’s kind are deluded romantic fools. At the very blessed best, she simply doesn’t care.”

  He licked the last brown crumb of yeastcake from the corner of his mouth.

  “Living things are in the race against us, for food and space and power.” Hopefully,

  he licked for another crumb. “The nearer they are to us, the crueler the conflict. Life knows our own dear kin are deadly enough. People might be worse than nature—if they possessed the wondrous mystery of that wicked anomaly.

  “Anyhow, each of us is trapped between nature and mankind—pitiless nature and pitiless men!”

  He shuddered fearfully.

  “That’s why I choose machines. Their mission is to serve us. They aren’t hi mortal competition with us for the precious prize of life, as our fellow beings are. They wear no cloak of wicked mystery, as nature does. They do what they are made to do, and that is that.”

  “Giles, you’re dead wrong.”

  Lilith Adams had been sitting straight and alert at the little table, gazing down at that dull black death’s-head on her finger. Her fine head was tilted slightly, and her lean white face wore a look of desperate intentness—almost I felt as if she were listening for Ken Star to call again from his strange battle in the wild heart of the anomaly.

  “I love nature.” She looked abruptly back at us, her bronze eyes darkly grave. “I love the seas and fields of Earth. I love the cratered dust of Mars and the methane glaciers of Titan. I love the endless wild infinity of space—even as it looks from Nowhere Near.

  “I can’t believe this anomaly is natural!”

  “We’ve considered that it might be an artifact,” I agreed. “But in twenty years of watching we’ve never found a clue to indicate any kind of cause for it, natural or not.”

  “I think you have a clue now,” she said. “You have that enemy machine!”

  “Mortal—mortal me!” Old Habibula croaked and sputtered. “Let’s not speak of that fearful machine!”

  “I think we must,” Lilith said. “Not all machines were made by men. Or designed to help men. If enemy machines made this anomaly, I think they may be worse than men or nature either—”

  We all started when my intercom whined.

  “C-c-c-captain, sir!” Ketzler was stammering with tension and fatigue. “We’ve got another message from Commander Star, sir. S-s-s-s-something you should know. He says he is under a new attack from that enemy machine. The Quasar Quest is wrecked. He’s attempting to abandon ship. I th-th-th-thought you’d want to know, sir.”

  “Thank you, Ketzler. Is Star still aboard?”

  “I believe so, sir—though his signal was suddenly broken off. Most of his men had left the wreck in an escape capsule. Star and a few others stayed aboard to cover them. But their capsule was shot to pieces.”

  I heard him draw a ragged, rasping breath.

  “Wh-wh-wh-what shall we do, sir?”

  “Duty as usual,” I told him. “Keep the station going.”

  He paused a long time, while I shared his agony.

  “Y-y-y-y-y-yes, sir.”

  More faintly, a confusion of other lifted voices from the control drum came over the open intercom. Though the words were blurred, the tones were sharp with shock and consternation.

  “A light, sir!” Ketzler’s voice came shrill with excitement, his stammer gone. “A queer light in space! We can see that enemy machine!”

 

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