The terror of his words ringing in my brain, I stared at Lilith. Though the rest of us were on our feet by then, she sat rigid and pale, staring down at the dull black skull on her ring as if its glittering ruby eyes had somehow hypnotized her.

  The Bubble of Darkness

  Old Habibula and Lilith came with me down to the north observatory. Though he was acting half paralyzed with fear, she appeared desperately eager to see that strange light and the enemy machine.

  I let them come because the riddle of their visit was not yet solved. Perhaps I had sensed a connection I could not understand, between the problem they had brought to the station and the peril outside— between those asteroids vanishing from the dark heart of the anomaly and those able spacemen vanishing from Scabbard’s geodesic flyer.

  The men on duty in the zero-G dome seemed unnerved when they saw us flying in on the cable, almost as if they had taken us for mechanized invaders.

  “Captain, you sort of startled me.” The dome chief hushed a harsh, unnatural laugh. “There’s the light—whatever it is!”

  A gaunt and fearful ghost in the blood-colored glow from the instruments, he pointed a pale crimson arm at the transite dome. In a moment I found the light—it looked like a yellow star hung in the black pit of Nowhere.

  “It’s going out, sir,” he added huskily. “Estimated magnitude two point three when we first observed it. Now about three point six. But still bright enough to show that— thing!”

  The fan-jets lifted us into the greenish glow of the projection cell. We hung to the cold chrome rail at the back of the long narrow tube, watching the huge luminous screen that amplified the image from the electronic telescope.

  Here that light was a tiny, bright-green disk. The rest of the screen was only a faintly greenish blankness, until the nervous dome chief adjusted the controls. Shadowy

  shapes flickered and dissolved, and suddenly we saw the enemy machine.

  Old Habibula made a low, hollow moan. I felt Lilith start and stiffen. A numbing something tingled at the back of my neck.

  The thing covered half of that enormous tube. We saw it in shades of glowing green, outlined by that fading star. I felt stunned by its size, utterly baffled by its shape.

  “A machine!” Even now, Lilith’s tight and breathless voice seemed curiously calm. “One men never made!”

  “A fearful machine!” whispered old Habibula. “A monstrous machine. I’m not sure I like it!”

  If its hugeness was dazing, its shape overwhelmed me. Parts projected out of it, but I could not call them masts or tentacles or towers—they fitted no familiar pattern. Their shadows, greenish black upon the screen, veiled whatever they projected from.

  “If machines are designed to do things—” Though I was fighting for control, my voice came out hoarse and shaken. “What is this one for?”

  “For nothing good,” old Habibula whimpered. “You can see its makers mean us fearful evil!”

  “How is that, Giles?” Lilith’s voice was breathlessly intent. “What can you tell about it?”

  “Too mortal much!” Clutching that cold rail, he shuddered apprehensively. “We can tell that it was built to propel itself through space, even in this fearful anomaly. We can tell that it was built to attack and pursue other spacecraft. We can tell that its unknown weapons were too much for poor Ken Star’s Quasar Quest. We can tell more, as we watch it work.

  “For life’s sweet sake—look at that!”

  His voice sank into a shivering moan.

  Watching the screen, we saw the machine dart closer to that dying star. We saw a long projection, neither arm nor crane nor cable, extend itself to seize the star. The star was covered, dimmed, extinguished. The whole screen went greenish-black.

  “What happened?” Lilith whispered sharply. “Where did it go?”

  “Space is mortal dark out here,” old Habibula gasped. “With the nearest star thirty trillion miles away. Since the wicked thing put out the light, it’s black as space itself. But at least we saw it work.”

  “What do you make of that, Giles?”

  “Trouble!” he moaned. “Fearful trouble.”

  With nothing more to see, we left the dome. I escorted Lilith and Habibula back to the full-G ring, and then made a careful tour of the duty posts. I found the men dangerously restive.

  The unknown light had been put out. The enemy machine had vanished from our

  instruments. No new message had come from Commander Star. Only the great electronic chart on the end of the control drum showed the anomaly still growing— that black-bellied creature fatter, its purple legs reaching farther, its bright magnetic web spreading around and beyond us.

  Without the chart, the anomaly was still invisible—perhaps that was the most dreadful thing about it. Only our computed drift revealed the intense gravitic forces dragging us deeper into that deadly web in spite of the thrust of our rockets.

  The whole station was hushed and breathless with a sense of unseen menace closing in, so intangibly strange that we could not shield ourselves against it. The strain of waiting—waiting for a shape of danger that we could not even imagine—was harder to endure even than the seen threat of that dark machine.

  My next long watch had come and gone, when Commander Star reached the station. He came in the smaller escape capsule from the Quasar Quest, with only two men of his crew. To avoid detection, they had drifted all the way with dead rockets, keeping radio and laser silence. We had no notice of their coming until their retro-rockets fired, fifteen minutes away.

  I hurried down to meet Ken Star in the lock. He came out of the capsule with a sling for his right arm and a bandage around his head. His gray face was streaked with grime. Yet I thought he bore himself well.

  One of his men had both legs broken, and the other was dying of what seemed to be radiation sickness. At the station hospital, he made the medics do all they could for the injured men before he let them touch him.

  Though the medics tried to insist, he refused to go to bed. His wounds were superficial, and he insisted that he had slept hi the capsule. Dressed in a uniform of Ketzler’s, with clean sling and bandages, he let me take him up to eat in the mess hall.

  A slight, quiet man, somewhat stooped, he looked more scholar than soldier. Though the medics had washed off the blood and dirt, his face was still seamed with fatigue. At first I had been vaguely disappointed to find that a son of the legendary John Star could be so small and frail and vulnerable, but I soon began to admire him.

  “The rest of the crew left first,” he was saying as we left the elevator. “They took the larger capsule, with my executive officer in charge. The three of us tried to keep our attacker entertained, while they got away.”

  He shook his head slightly, then froze himself, as if the movement hurt.

  “That scheme failed,” he said. “The capsule was knocked out with what must have been a micro-missile—a tiny projectile fired at a fantastic velocity.”

  He was limping a little, and he let me catch his arm to help him board the moving rim walk.

  “The same sort of micro-missile made scrap metal of the Quasar Quest.” His voice was harsh and tired and bitter. “We had no chance at all—the finest cruiser in the Legion would have had no better chance. ‘

  “Not against those missiles!

  “We’d see a faint flash many thousand miles away. The shot would hit us instantly— so hard it excited gamma radiation. I suppose those projectiles would be weighed in milligrams, but they are unbeatable. No possible shield could stop them. No possible ship could evade them.

  “If you had seen that machine—”

  “We did,” I told him. “By the light of—something.”

  “That something was the Quasar Quest.” His worn face twitched with pain. “We had just got out of the wreck when they hit it with something else. Nothing that we could detect. But the hulk turned incandescent. Perhaps they were sterilizing it, before they came to pick it up! Another unbeatable weapon!”

  “Commander—” I had to stop and steady my own voice. “What is this invader?”

  Sagging wearily in the borrowed uniform, his worn body shrugged.

  “If you saw it, Captain, you know as much as I do.”

  At the mess hall, he got off the rim-strip with no help. Though we were early for dinner, we found old Habibula and Lilith already there. Habibula had an open tin of caviar and two bottles of his precious wine on the table before him. When the commander saw them, he stopped with a gasp.

  “Lil! Giles!” He seemed delighted, yet somehow disturbed to see them. “I thought you’d be waiting for me, back at sector base.”

  They were gaping with the same astonishment.

  “Ken Star!” old Habibula bellowed. “We thought you were dead in space, killed by that enemy machine!”

  Flushed and lovely with pleasure, bronze eyes glowing, Lilith came running to throw her arms around him so vigorously that he flinched with pain. I felt a sharper pang of puzzled jealousy. A very remarkable nurse, I thought, to be on kissing terms with Bob Star’s brother!

  “Ken, we were afraid to wait,” she told him. “There was no way of communication, to you or Nowhere Near. We didn’t know what had happened. We got passage out here on a chartered ship—and finally persuaded Captain Ulnar to take us aboard.”

  She gave me a dazzling, half-malicious smile.

  Old Habibula came lumbering after the girl. With a hearty warmth, he wrung Ken Star’s hand—and then stepped back, his wine-colored eyes squinted fearfully.

  “Where have you been?” he gasped. “What mortal peril have you uncovered, to chase you out of Nowhere—”

  The shrill whine of my lapel intercom cut him off.

  “Captain Ulnar!” Ketzler was on duty, his voice hoarse and breathless with alarm. “We’ve just observed something I think you ought to know about.”

  “What is that, Ketzler?” “We don’t know what it is.” His voice rose uncertainly. “Something out in the middle

  of the anomaly. Nothing you can see, sir— except that it’s blotting out the stars behind it. It looks like a bubble, sir. A bubble of darkness!” “Thank you, Ketzler.” “Any—any orders, sir?” “Watch it,” I said. “Report any change.” “It’s growing, sir. It’s already more than one degree across. And—” His shaken voice

  hesitated, and rushed on suddenly. “You know we’re drifting toward it, sir!” “I know,” I said. “Keep me informed.” “Yes, sir. I’ll do that, sir.” The intercom clicked off. Feeling more deeply shaken than I had wanted Ketzler and the station crew to know, I

  looked at Ken Star. He had limped across to the table and sunk into a chair. He sat

  staring up at Lilith, a gray pallor of dismay on his pinched and haggard face. “I’m afraid I know what that bubble is,” he whispered huskily. “I have a theory, anyhow—a theory that frightens me!”

  He extended a bloodless, trembling hand to take the girl’s.

  “I’m glad you and Giles aren’t still waiting back at sector base. I suspect that the Legion is going to need your special skills right here —soon and desperately!” 7 ‘Older Than the Universe“ Four of us in the drab little mess hall, we gathered at the table. I leaned to punch the

  computer for our meals, but Ken Star shook his bandaged head. “Later,” he murmured huskily. “Let it wait.” Old Habibula, with a generosity unusual in him, punched for four glasses and shared a

  bottle of his wine. It was a pale dry vintage half a century old, but nobody commented on its bouquet—or even on the remarkable fact that the sunlight which passed old Earth on its vintage year had not yet reached Nowhere Near.

  Lean and clear and lovely in her white, Lilith sat looking sometimes at Star and Habibula and me, sometimes at the dull black skull on her hand, and sometimes far away. Again I had the sense that she was listening, as if she feared to hear the coming of something dreadful from that bubble of featureless darkness that was growing out in Nowhere.

  “Tell us, Ken!” old Habibula croaked. “What is this fearful theory that alarms you

  so?” Star took an absent sip of wine. I saw the glass trembling in his frail hand. Settling carefully back into the chair, as if he had suffered more injuries than he reported to

  the medics, he spoke to Lilith, almost ignoring old Habibula and me.

  “I’m tired,” His voice was weak, but steady and clear. “Shaken up. But I’ll try to give you the facts you’re going to need, in some intelligible order. You know I’ve spent my life digging into the riddle of this anomaly. I led the first survey and helped set up this station. Most of the time since I’ve been at the big cosmological observatory on Contra-Saturn. That’s where I worked out the theory.”

  He paused as if to rest.

  “What’s so mortal alarming in a theory?” old Habibula croaked. “Why did you have to send for us?”

  “The theory led me to expect something like that enemy machine —some further display of an alien technology advanced far beyond our own. I was prepared for hostility—but I wasn’t expecting it quite so soon.”

  Star’s bandaged head shook painfully.

  “Our purpose on this first flight of the Quasar Quest was only to make a preliminary test. I was not expecting you to follow me here, though now it’s fortunate you did. I was intending to return to sector base to pick you up—if we found that your singular skills were needed.”

  I sat staring at old Habibula’s rosy, hairless baby-head and Lilith’s lean and desperate loveliness, wondering blankly what possible skills they might possess that would be of any use against the monstrous threat of Nowhere.

  “To test the theory,” Star went on, “we measured the age of those rocks in the anomaly—”

  “How’s that?” Old Habibula gave him a fishy stare. “How can you measure the age of a mortal rock?”

  “In this case, by spectrographic analysis.” Star’s worn voice was carefully precise. “Because matter does age. New planetary matter— its elements created perhaps in an exploding supernova—does have a pretty specific atomic composition. It contains a rather definite proportion of the radioactive elements which decay with time.”

  “A dismal universe,” muttered old Habibula. “Where matter itself grows old!”

  “For the initial tests,” Star went on, “we used the thorium series. The element thorium has a half-life somewhat more than thirteen billion years—which means that in thirteen billion years about half of any given sample of Thorium-232 will decay into the isotope, Lead-208.”

  Star paused, as if to recover voice and strength.

  “Take wine, Ken!” old Habibula urged him. “It’s like precious new blood in your veins.” With a rare hospitality, he overflowed Star’s scarcely tasted glass. “How old are the rocks?”

  “Old

  ” Star’s voice faded to a papery whisper. He waved away the wine, with a grateful nod at old Habibula. His haggard eyes darted a sharp glance at me. As if we didn’t matter, he spoke again to Lilith. “Unbelievably old

  ”

  Nervously, old Habibula gulped his own wine.

  Star straightened his bandaged head. He drew a long uneven breath, as if struggling to recover himself. Lilith reached quickly across the table to grasp his hand. For a few seconds he sat silent, smiling at her fondly. Then he spoke again more vigorously.

  “Our known universe has an age that we can ascertain,” he said. “Our native sun and its planets are about four billion years old. The oldest stars in our galaxy are only a billion years older. Computations show that the expansion of our universe began no more than six billion years ago. Nothing older exists anywhere—except these anomalous rocks!”

  That slow smile gone, he sat staring bleakly at Lilith.

  “Nobody wanted to believe our results,” he said. “We repeated the thorium tests. We ran a control experiment with Uranium-238— which normally decays to another lead isotope, Lead-207, after a half-life of four and a half billion years. Always our answers supported the disquieting theory that we had come to check.”

  His bloodshot eyes looked haunted.

  “Our test results show that these anomalous asteroids now contain less than one percent of the original Uranium-238 and no more than twenty-five percent of the original Thorium-232. That means that the indicated age of these rocks is at least twenty-five billion years.

  “They are four times older than our universe!”

  Old Habibula’s pink moon-face turned pale. He flinched back apprehensively, almost as if the age of those ancient rocks had been a contagious disease that he was afraid of catching from Star.

  “Commander,” I broke in, “may I ask one question?”

  He inclined his bandaged head.

  “I’ve been watching these rocks too, for several years,” I said.

  “They seem peculiar in many ways. How do you know that they are a representative sample of the original matter—wherever they come from! Couldn’t the thorium and uranium have been removed by some other process than age?”

  “Thank you, Captain.” He answered with a methodic, painful care. “I know these rocks are anomalous in other ways than age—in size and shape and composition. But I think we took account of every possible source of error. What we measured was not the total amount of thorium or uranium, but the ratio of each to its own peculiar isotope of lead. What we analyzed was not just the various alloys of the asteroids themselves, but also collected samples of adhering surface dust.”

  As if he had forgotten me and my objection, he turned stiffly back to Lilith. His frail hand was clutching hers on the tabletop, as if hi desperate anxiety.

  “Even that dust is four times older than the oldest things known outside of the anomaly,” he told her. “Even the dust speaks for the theory that brought me here.”

  Her lean face looked pale and taut as his.

  “What is that theory, Ken?”

  Pausing as if to organize his thoughts, he took an absent sip of old Habibula’s wine.

  “It developed from my work on Contra-Saturn,” he said. “I was studying the objects once called quasars—the quasi-stellar objects which looked like stars but turned out to be exploding galaxies. The biggest bombs in the universe! A single quasar explosion has the force of one hundred millions suns turned into raw energy.”

 

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