Stardust Read online

  Stardust

  Chad Oliver

  First published in Astounding Science Fiction, July 1952.

  This copy derived from the above source.

  In space, people can get lost for a looooong time! Then, mere physical rescue is not enough; there’s little point rescuing a mans body, if you kill his mind doing it!

  * * *

  Collins floated through the jet blackness with every sense alert. He heard the low hum of voices welling up out of the emptiness ahead of him and the oxygen in the still air tasted sweet to him as he drank it into his lungs. The cold smell of metal was all around him, hemming him in, and he shivered involuntarily in the darkness.

  At precisely the right instant, he extended his hand forward, made contact with an invisible brace that felt rough and dead to his tingling fingers, and changed direction with a light, delicate shove. The new tunnel was almost as dark as the one he had left behind him, but he could see a faint luminous haze in the distance. His pulses quickened as tiny warmth currents touched his skin and he caught the smell of men in the abyss ahead of him.

  It was good to be going toward men, Collins thought. It was a good feeling. He kept to the exact center of the shaft, as far away from the cold metal taste as he could get. A man knew loneliness in the eternal night, alone with his thoughts. A man knew fear—

  He guided his body around another turn, and still another, and felt the sudden life shocks in front of him. He closed his eyes to narrow slits, letting them adjust. He could feel space and air on all sides, and the cold, unpleasant smell of metal receded into the distance. Warmth currents bathed his skin—and yet there was a coolness even here, an icy coolness of hostility that mottled the warmth tides like a cancerous disease—

  Collins shook the feeling from his mind. Slowly, gradually, the chamber took shape around him, although he still could not look directly at the intolerable, flickering flame that hissed and sputtered atop the fire torch. Black shadows writhed in the gray halflight on the periphery of the fire-glow and white bodies floated all around him, waiting.

  Collins took a deep breath. He could see again.

  “Class will come to order,” he said into the silence.

  The men—young men, all of them—hesitated and then moved into a circle around him. The circle was composed of three distinct layers, one even with Collins, one slightly above him, and another just below him. Each layer contained four men. Collins forced himself to look directly at the fire torch, even though the unaccustomed brightness lanced little needles of pain through his eyes and narrowed their pupils to tiny dots of black. It was not easy, but he kept his face expressionless.

  Men were made to live in light.

  “Before we start, do any of you have any questions about your work for today?” His voice was soft, patient. But it had a firm edge to it—sheathed now, but capable of cutting like a knife when the need arose.

  The young men looked at each other, faintly hostile, uncertain.

  “Speak up,” Collins said, smiling. “Asking questions is not a sign of ignorance, you know. It is only the stupid who never ask questions.”

  One of the men cleared his throat. It was Lanson, one of the most intelligent of them. Collins nodded encouragement.

  “We don’t understand our problem for today, sir,” he said, faintly accenting the sir to give it a slightly contemptuous ring. “We’ve talked it over among ourselves, but we can’t seem to get it.”

  “Be specific, Lanson. Exactly what is it that you do not understand?”

  Lanson shifted nervously in the still air. “It’s about this problem of falling bodies, sir,” he said. His voice was genuinely puzzled now; Lanson was interested almost in spite of himself. “You stated that, because of gravity, two bodies will fall through a vacuum at precisely the same rate of speed, regardless of weight—that is, if we get your meaning correctly, a heavy body will fall with the same speed as a light body, or, to use your example, a piece of paper and a chunk of metal will hit the floor together.”

  “O.K. so far, Lanson,” Collins braced himself, knowing what was coming. It was difficult.

  “Well, sir,” Lanson continued, choosing his words with care, “we sort of see what you’re driving at in the concepts heavy and light—but what is falling? What pushes the piece of paper and the chunk of metal down? Why don’t they float like we do?”

  “They do float,” a voice whispered loudly. “Everyone knows that.”

  Collins looked at the white bodies around him, pale and ghostly in the dancing fireglow. Beyond them, the great darkness hovered like a gigantic beast, shadow tentacles writhing, waiting to envelop them, pull them all into the black vault of the abyss. Collins shivered again as an icy chill crawled down his spine. They couldn’t go on like this forever, he knew. They weren’t trying the way they used to—it was very hard, and they weren’t trying. Every day, every hour, they lost ground. And below them, dancing around their great fires—

  He had to make them see.

  “You are right, in a sense,” he told them carefully. “I’m glad to see that you’re using your minds and not just accepting what I say without thought of your own. They do float, as you’ve seen—here. The point is that conditions here are unnatural, not normal, although they are the only ones we’ve ever known. I’ve tried to tell you about gravity—”

  “Him and his gravity,” someone snickered.

  “We’re not approaching the situation with the proper gravity,” someone else whispered. Several of the young men laughed aloud at the pun, staring at Collins with ill-concealed contempt.

  “Yes, but what is gravity?” Lanson persisted. “You say that in science we experiment, we measure, we deal with facts rather than wishful thinking. Very well—show us some gravity then.”

  Collins breathed deeply, feeling the doubt all around him. “I can show you no gravity that you can recognize as such,” he said slowly. “Nor can I show you the atoms of which matter is composed, much less the subatomic constituents of the atoms themselves. You must be patient, you must consider the situation in which we find ourselves. Even in science, gentlemen, there are times when we must go along on faith, do the best we can—”

  “We’re not trying to dispute your word, sir,” said Lanson, who was doing precisely that. “But it seems to us that even if all this stuff were true somewhere, sometime, we still have to live here and not there. Since we have to live here, why not confine ourselves to this world, to what can be of practical use to us, and just forget about—”

  “No!” Collins said sharply, the anger rising in him like a hot flood. “That will do, Lanson, unless you wish to be reported. We must not forget, or we are lost, we are animals, we are no longer men. One day you will see and understand. Until then—”

  He stopped, suddenly. The men shifted uncertainly in the air. Collins tensed, every sense alive, vibrant, questing. He probed the deep shadows. His skin tingled. Something was out there—those shadows were no longer empty. Something—

  “The other men,” he hissed. “Kill that torch.”

  The flame sputtered and died. The men drifted backward, united now against a common danger, fighting to adjust their eyes again to the absence of light. Collins felt his heart hammering in his throat and cold sweat in the palms of his hands. He drew his knife, waiting.

  In the dead silence, panic stalked on padded feet through the chamber of darkness.

  Ship’s Officer Mark Langston tossed off a few choice expletives and permitted them to explode harmlessly within the confines of his book-lined office. He flipped open a desk drawer, removed a well-worn flask, and treated himself to a short snifter of Scotch. Then he replaced the flask, banished the contemptuous expression from his face, and glued a patient smile to his mouth.

  “Come in,” he said, bracing himself.

  The office door opened with a calm precision that hinted at a hurricane just below the horizon. A tall, angular, hatchet-faced woman marched inexorably into the room with her teen-age daughter following meekly in her wake.

  “You are the Ship’s Officer?” inquired the woman in a voice like a file sawing on iron.

  “Right the first time,” said Mark Langston.

  “You’re not the same man I spoke to last time,” the woman stated suspiciously. “Where is Mr. Raleigh?”

  “He jumped overboard,” Mark Langston wanted to say.

  “Mr. Raleigh is not on duty at the moment,” Mark Langston said. “My name is Langston—may I be of service?”

  “Well, I should certainly hope so. I am Mrs. Simmons, and this is my daughter Laura.”

  Mark Langston nodded and glanced at the note that Raleigh had left on his desk. As a small token of my esteem, I have willed you Mrs. Simmons, the note read. May God have mercy on your soul.

  “What seems to be the trouble, Mrs. Simmons?”

  Mrs. Simmons sighed deeply, giving an excellent imitation of a death rattle. “It’s this excruciating artificial gravity, Mr. Langston,” she said. “I simply cannot stand it another moment. I’m having terrible pains around my heart and my back aches. I’m a nervous wreck. You’ve got to do something, my man. And my darling Laura absolutely can’t sleep at night—she does need her sleep so, she’s such a delicate child. Aren’t you, Laura?”

  “Yes, mother,” said Laura in a delicate voice.

  “Well now, Mrs. Simmons,” Langston said carefully, struggling desperately to maintain the smile on his face, “I find this most difficult to understand. Do you have these symptoms back on Earth? You see, ship’s gravity is kept at all times at Ear
th normal—there’s no difference whatever, in effect, between artificial gravity and the gravity you have lived with all your life.”

  “My good man,” Mrs. Simmons said, drawing herself up haughtily, “are you accusing me of—”

  “Not at all, not at all,” Langston lied. He forced himself to remember Mr. Simmons and his power and influence with the Interstellar Board of Trade. “It’s quite possible that the machinery is out of adjustment or something. I’ll check into it at once, Mrs. Simmons. We will spare no effort in securing your comfort during your stay on our ship. In the meantime, won’t you check with Dr. Ford on Three Deck? I’m certain that he’ll be able to help you and your daughter.”

  Mrs. Simmons brightened visibly. “Oh Mr. Langston!” she breathed. “Do you really think I require medical attention?”

  “It’s entirely possible, Mrs. Simmons,” Mark Langston said, and meant it. He neglected to mention what sort of medical attention he thought Mrs. Simmons needed, but that was a minor detail. “I’ll buzz Dr. Ford and he’ll be ready to take care of you instantly.”

  “Thank you so much,” Mrs. Simmons said happily. “Come, Laura—now watch your step, dear.”

  Mrs. Simmons and her offspring left the room and the door hissed shut behind them. Mark Langston maliciously neglected to warn Ford in advance; it was a dirty trick to play on the Doc, of course, but Ford was capable of handling the situation and would duly dispatch Mrs. Simmons and Laura to some other luckless official.

  Langston got up from his desk and limped over to the private screen against the outside wall. He flicked it on and an infinity of night reached coldly into his soul and pulled him out among a myriad of incredible stars—

  There it was, right in his office with him. Space, deep space, the endless darkness and the stars that had been his life, his very being. He lost himself in the ever-new immensities. This was space—the space that he had helped to conquer, the star trails that he had made his own. This was the strange world that he had chosen for a home. Out there, far beyond imagining, distant beyond belief, the men and the women that he had lived with, fought with, laughed with, flashed forever into the deeps of night. They carried the great adventure onward, always, and now—

  And now he was no longer with them.

  Mark Langston turned off the screen and limped back to his desk. They had opened up the greatest frontier of them all—and for what? For Mrs. Simmons and Laura? For stupidity and greed and ignorance? For wealthy tourists who made the Earth a world to be ridiculed? For what?

  Yes, he was still in space. He smiled without humor. He would have been wiser to have stayed on Earth, or on one of a hundred worlds that he had known. Wiser to have cut it cleanly and for good. Wiser to have left space behind him. Once, on the long runs, the new runs, he had been proud and happy to be a man; he had gloried in it. Now—

  But he could not leave space. It was a part of him.

  A red light flashed over his visibox. He switched it on. It was Stan Owens, the ship anthropologist. He looked excited, which was profoundly unusual.

  “What’s up, Stan? More of those pesky space pirates?”

  “Cut the clowning, Father Time. We’ve run smack dab into the middle of something.”

  “On the Capella run? What is it—the Ultimate Boredom at last?”

  “On the level, Mark. We need you in the control room on the double.”

  Mark Langston eyed his friend’s face with sudden interest. “Hey,” he said, “you’re not kidding!”

  “Come up and see for yourself,” Owens smiled, and switched off.

  Mark Langston left his office at a thoroughly respectable speed, hurried down the corridor with scarcely a limp, and caught the lift to the control room. He stepped out and instantly it hit him—the spirit, the feel of a ship up against the unknown. He had known that feeling a thousand times in his life, and he responded to it with a spreading grin.

  Owens collared him and pulled him toward a knot of men gathered around a subsidiary computer. “Hang on tight, old son,” the anthropologist said. “This may be too much for your ancient nervous system—this crate has hit the well-known jackpot.”

  The men stepped back to make room and Captain Kleberg welcomed Mark by shoving a computer report into his hand. “Take a look at this, Mark,” he said, running his fingers through his iron-gray hair. “I’ve about decided that the computer’s psycho, or we’re psycho, or both.”

  Langston examined the report with a practiced eye. It was a sub-space survey report—normal space being sub-space with respect to their ship, the Wilson Langford, in hyperspace—and seemed to be routine enough at first glance. There was the usual coordinate check, the drift check, the hydrogen check, the distress beam check—nothing to get excited about. In fact—

  Then he saw it.

  “But that’s impossible,” he said.

  “Agreed,” said Captain Kleberg. “But there it is.”

  “You figure it out,” Owens suggested.

  Mark Langston checked the report again carefully. “Is this a gag?” he asked, knowing full well that it wasn’t. “There can’t be a ship down there.”

  “Just the same,” pointed out the Navigation Officer, “thar she blows!”

  “Maybe it’s the Flying Dutchman,” Owens offered.

  Langston tried to think the thing through logically. But it simply wasn’t logical. There evidently was some sort of a ship down there, in normal space, light-years out from any planetary system. What was it doing . there? How did it get there?

  “Any distress calls of any sort?” he asked.

  “Dead silence,” said Captain Kleberg. “And we can’t get a blip out of her.”

  “How about positioning?”

  “We’re almost directly ‘above’ her,” the Navigation Officer reported. “We’re practically back-pedaling to keep from losing her.”

  “How about acceleration?”

  “Hard to tell, but I’d guess that she’s in free fall. Absolutely no energy tracings at all, and no radiation. She’s dead.”

  Langston let that sink in for a minute. “Have you got a picture yet?” he asked finally.

  “They’re building one up downstairs,” Captain Kleberg said. “It isn’t an easy job, of course, but they should be getting something soon.”

  “Just wait until some of our noble human cargo gets wind of the fact that we’re off our course and will miss scheduled landing time by a week or three,” Stan Owens chuckled. “We’ll have everybody down on us like a pack of hyenas.”

  “That isn’t funny,” said Captain Kleberg.

  “We’ll probably get strung up by our thumbs,” Mark Langston said, “while the esteemed officials of the Interstellar Board of Trade dance around the tribal fires and massage our toes with jolly acid.”

  “That isn’t funny either,” the harassed captain pointed out.

  “Have you met Mrs. Simmons?” asked Stan Owens fiendishly. “A very interesting cultural phenomenon—”

  “You and your cultural phenomena,” shot back Captain Kleberg.

  “You anthropologists think you’re so—”

  There was a whirring buzz and a three-dimensional mock-up thumped out of a chute. Captain Kleberg snatched it up and put it on a chart table where everyone could get a good look at it.

  There was a dead silence in the control room.

  “It just can’t be,” Captain Kleberg said finally, his voice very small.

  “No,” Mark Langston agreed softly. “But it is.”

  The men stared at each other, searching for words that were not there.

  They came up from the depths, spawned in hate, fed on fury. Collins could smell them, feel the warmth currents from their bodies and the rush and surge of air currents from beating wings. They choked the chamber, tilling it, strangling it, shooting up like gas under pressure from the world below.

  Like creatures from hell, and yet—Collins edged back to the mouth of the tunnel and stopped, letting the rest of the rear guard slide into position around him. Differences were forgotten now, melted in the flame of danger. Collins smiled without humor. It was ironic—they respected him only as a fighter—

  He floated down to the very floor of the chamber and touched the cold metal. He blanked his mind, watching his chance.