Читать книгу The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s - Brian Aldiss - Страница 7

When conditions veer away from normal, human reason tends to slip into madness.

Eddy Sharn looked at the sentence in his notebook and found it good. He sat with the notebook clutched in tight to his chest, so that Malravin could not see what he wrote. ‘Tends to slip into madness’ he particularly liked; the ‘tends’ had a note of scientific detachment about it, the ‘madness’ suggested something altogether more wild than ‘insanity.’ Which was appropriate, since they were a scientific detachment out in the wilds.

He was still savouring his little joke when the noises began in the hatch.

Malravin and Sharn exchanged glances. Malravin jerked his head towards the hatch.

‘You hear that fool fellow Dominguey? He makes all that noise on purpose, so that we’ll know he’s coming. What a big-headed joker to chose for a captain!’

‘You can’t help making a noise in that hatch,’ Sharn said. ‘It was badly designed. They missed out on the soundproofing and the noise carries round in the air circuits. Besides, they’re both in there making a noise. Jim Baron’s with him.’

He spoke pleasantly enough, but of course Malravin’s had been a loaded remark. The great Siberian oaf knew that among the four antagonisms that had sprung up between the four men on the ship, some sort of an alliance had grown between Sharn and Dominguey.

The hatch opened, and the other members of the crew of the Wilson entered and began to remove their bulky suits. Neither Malravin nor Sharn moved to help them. Dominguey and Baron helped each other.

Billy Dominguey was a striking young man, dark and sinewy, with a wonderfully gloomy cavern of a face that could break into laughter when anyone responded to his peculiar sense of fun.

Jim Baron was another doleful-looking type, a little compact man with a crew-cut and solid cheeks that had turned red from his exertions outside.

He eyed Sharn and Malravin and said, ‘Well, you’d better get your sacks on and go out and have a look at it. You won’t grasp its full impact until you do.’

‘It’s a real little education, Jim, isn’t it?’ Dominguey agreed. ‘A higher education – I just wish they hadn’t “highered” me to get it.’

Baron put his arms out with his fingers extended and touched the plastic of the bulkheads. He closed his eyes.

‘I didn’t think I’d ever make it back into here, Billy. I’m sorry if I went a bit –’

Quickly, Dominguey said, ‘Yes, it’s good to be back in the ship. With the artificial ½G being maintained in here, and the shutters down, this dump seems less like a cast-off version of hell, doesn’t it?’ He took Baron’s arm and led him to a chair. Sharn watched curiously; he had not seen the stolid and unimaginative Baron so wild-eyed before.

‘But the weight business,’ Baron was saying. ‘I thought – well, I don’t know what I thought. There’s no rational way of putting it. I thought my body was disintegrating. I –’

‘Jim, you’re over-excited,’ Dominguey said harshly. ‘Keep quiet or get yourself a sedative.’ He turned to the other two men. ‘I want you two to get outside right away. There’s nothing there that can possibly harm you; we’re down on a minor planet, by the looks of things. But before we can evaluate the situation, I want you to be properly aware of what the situation is – as soon as possible.’

‘Did you establish the spectroscope? Did you get any readings?’ Sharn asked. He was not keen to go outside.

‘They’re still out there. Get your suit on, Eddy, and you, Ike, and go and look at them. Jim and I will get a bite to eat. We set the instruments up and we left ’em out there on the rock, pointing at Big Bertha, but they don’t give any readings. Not any readings that make sense.’

‘For God’s sake, you must have got something. We checked all the gear before you carted it outside.’

‘If you don’t believe us, you get out there and have a goddamned good look for yourself, Sharn,’ Baron said.

‘Don’t shout at me, Baron.’

‘Well, take that sick look off your face. Billy and me have done our stint – now you two get outside as Billy says. Take a walk around as we did. Take your time. We’ve got plenty till the drive is mended.’

Malravin said, ‘I’d prefer to get on straightening out the coil. No point for me to go out there. My job is in the ship.’

‘I’m not going out there alone, Ike, so don’t try to worm out of it,’ Sharn said. ‘We agreed that we should go out there when these two came back.’

‘If we came back, conquering heroes that we are,’ Dominguey corrected. ‘You might have had a meal ready to celebrate our return, Eddy.’

‘We’re on half rations, if you remember.’

‘I try never to remember a nasty fact like that,’ Dominguey said good-humouredly.

A preoccupation with food signifies a childish nature, Eddy thought. He must write it down later.

After more quarrelling, Sharn and Malravin climbed into their suits and headed for the hatch. They knew roughly what they would see outside – they had seen enough from the ship’s ports before they had agreed to close down all the shutters – but to view it from outside was psychologically a very different matter.

‘One thing,’ Baron called to them. ‘Watch out for the atmosphere. It has a way of wandering.’

‘There can’t be an atmosphere on a planetoid this size!’ Sharn protested.

Baron came up to him and peeped through the helmet at him. His cheeks were still hectically flushed, his eyes wild.

‘Look, clever dick, get this into your head. We’ve arrived up in some ghastly hole in the universe where the ordinary physical laws don’t apply. This place can’t exist and Big Bertha can’t exist. Yet they do. You’re very fond of paradoxes – well, now one has gobbled you up. Just get out there quickly, and you won’t come back in as cocky as you are now.’

‘You love to blow your mouth off, Baron. It didn’t do you much good out there. I thought you were going to die of fright just now.’

Dominguey said urgently, ‘Hey, you two sweet little fellows, stop bitching. I warn you, Eddy, Jim is right. You’ll see when you get outside that in this bit of heaven the universe is horribly out of joint.’

‘So will someone’s nose be,’ Sharn promised.

He tramped into the hatch with Malravin. The burly Siberian thumbed the sunken toggle switches on the panel, and the air lock sank to ground level, its atmosphere exhausting as it went.

They unsealed the door and stepped out onto the rough surface of the planetoid Captain Dominguey had christened Erewhon. They stood with the doughnut shape of the Wilson on stilts behind them and tried to adjust to the prospect. If anything, they seemed to weigh slightly more than they had in. the ship’s artificially maintained ½G field, although the bulk of their suits made this hard to tell.

At first it was difficult to see anything; it was always to remain difficult to see anything well.

They stood on a tiny plain. The distance of the horizon was impossible to judge in the weird light. It seemed never more than a hundred yards away in any direction. It was distorted; this seemed to be because the plain was irregular. High banks, broken hollows, jagged lips of rock, formed the landscape, the features running higgledy-piggledy in a way that baffled sense. There was no sign of the atmosphere Baron had mentioned; the stars came down to the skyline and were sharply occulted by it.

With the hand claws of their suits touching, the two men began to walk forward. They could see Baron’s instruments standing deserted a short way off, and instinctively moved towards them. There was no need for lights; the entire bowl of the sky was awash with stars.

The Wilson was a deep penetration cartographic ship. With two sister ships, it was the first such vessel to venture into the heart of the Crab Nebula. There, weaving its way among the endless abysses of interstellar dust, it lost contact with the Brinkdale and the Grandon. The curtains of uncreated matter closed in on them, baffling even the subradio.

They went on. As they went, the concepts of space they had once held were erased. This was a domain of light and matter, not of emptiness and dark. All about them were coils of smoke – smoke set with sequins! – and cliffs of shimmering dust the surface of which they could not have explored in two lifetimes. To begin with the four men were elated at the sheer magnificence of the new environment. Later, the magnificence seemed not of beauty but of annihilation. It was too big, they were too insignificant. The four men retreated into silence.

But the ship continued on its course, for they had their orders and their honour, and their pay. According to plan, the Wilson sank into the heart of the nebula. The instrumentation had developed an increasing fault until it became folly to go farther, but fortunately they had then come to a region less tightly packed with stars and star matter. Beyond that was space, light years across, entirely free of physical bodies – except one.

They found soon enough that it was no stroke of fortune to be here. Swilling in the middle of the gigantic hole in space was the phenomenon they christened Big Bertha.

It was too big. It was impossible. But the instruments ceased to be reliable; without instruments, human senses were useless in such a region. Already bemused by travel, they were ill-equipped to deal with Big Bertha. To add to their troubles, the directional cyboscope that governed the jets in the ship’s equator broke down and became unreliable.

They took the only course open to them: they landed on the nearest possible body, to rest there while they did a repair job and re-established contact with their sister ships. The nearest possible body happened to be Erewhon.

Touchdown on Erewhon had been a little miracle, accomplished with few other instruments than human eyes, human hands, and a string of human blasphemies. The hammer of static radiated by Big Bertha rendered radio, radar, and radix all ineffective.

Now the sky was a wonder painful to view. Everywhere were the glittering points of stars, everywhere the immense plumes and shawls of inchoate matter illuminated by star-shine. Yet it was all far away, glittering beyond the gravitational pull of Bertha. In her domain, only the wretched planetoid the Wilson rested on seemed to exist. It was like being a bone alone in an empty room with a starving dog.

‘Gravitation can be felt not only in the muscles but in the thalamus. It is a power of darkness, perhaps the ultimate power.’

‘What’s that?’ Malravin asked, startled.

‘I was thinking aloud.’ Embarrassed, Sharn added, ‘Bertha will rise in a minute, Ike. Are you ready for it?’

They stopped by the pathetic cluster of instruments. They just stood there, rooted to the spot with a tension that could not be denied. Bertha had already begun to rise.

Their eyes were bad judges of what happened next, even with the infra-red screens pulled down over their faceplates. But they partly saw – and partly they felt, for a tidal sensation crawled across their bodies.

Above the eastern horizon, a section of the star field began to melt and sag. Star after star, cluster after cluster, uncountably stratified and then wavered and ran towards the horizon like ill-applied paint trickling down a wall. As if in sympathy, distortion also seized the bodies of Sharn and Malravin.

‘An illusion, an optical illusion,’ Malravin said, raising a hand to the melting lines of stars. ‘Gravity bending light. But I’ve – Eddy, I’ve got something in my suit with me. Let’s get back to the ship.’

Sharn could not reply. He fought silently with something inside his own suit, something closer to him than his muscles.

Where the stars flowed, something was lumbering up over the horizon, a great body sure of its strength, rising powerfully from its grave, thrusting up now a shoulder now a torso into the visible. It was Bertha. The two men sank clumsily to their knees.

Whatever it was, it was gigantic. It occupied about twenty degrees of arc. It climbed above the horizon – but more and more of it kept coming, and it seemed to expand as it came – it rose tall, swallowing the sky as it rose. Its outline indicated that it was spherical, though the outline was not distinct, the wavering bands of starlight rendering it impossible to see properly.

The sensation in Sharn’s body had changed. He felt lighter now, and more comfortable. The feeling that he was wearing someone else’s body had disappeared. In its place had come an odd lopsidedness. Drained, he could only peer up at the disturbance.

Whatever it was, it ate the sky. It did not radiate light. Yet what could be seen of it was clearly not seen by reflected light. It darkled in the sky.

‘It – emits black light,’ Sharn said. ‘Is it alive, Ike?’

‘It’s going to crush us,’ Ike said. He turned to crawl back to the ship, but at that instant the atmosphere hit them.

Sharn had drawn his gaze away from that awesome monster in space to see what Malravin was doing, so that he saw the atmosphere arrive. He put a claw up to shield his face as it hit.

The atmosphere came up over the horizon after Bertha. It came in long strands, travelling fast. With it came sound, a whisper that grew to a shriek that shrilled inside their faceplates. At first the vapour was no more than a confusion in the gloom, but as it thickened it became visible as drab grey cloud. There were electrical side effects too; corposants glowed along the ridges of rock about them. The cloud rose rapidly, engulfing them like an intangible sea.

Sharn found he was on his knees beside Malravin. They both had their headlights on now, and headed for the ship in a rapid shuffle. It was hard going. That lopsided effect spoilt their instinctive placing of their limbs.

Once they were touching the metal of the Wilson’s airlock, some of the panic left them. Both men stood up, breathing heavily. The level of the greyish gas had risen above their heads. Sharn moved out from under the bulk of the Wilson and looked into the sky. Bertha was still visible through haze.

It was evident that Erewhon had a rapid rotation speed. The monstrous black disc was already almost at zenith; surrounded by a halo of distorted starglow, it loured over the little ship like a milestone about to fall. Hesitantly, Sharn put up his hand to see if he could touch it.

Malravin tugged at his arm.

‘There’s nothing there,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible. It’s a dream, a figment. It’s the sort of thing you see in a dream. And how do you feel now? Very light now, as in a dream! It’s just a nightmare, and you’ll –’

‘You’re talking bloody nonsense, Malravin. You’re trying to escape into madness if you pretend it isn’t there. You wait till it falls down and crushes us all flat into the rock – then you’ll see whether it’s a dream or not!’

Malravin broke from him and ran to the air lock. He opened the door and climbed in, beckoning to Sharn. Sharn stood where he was, laughing. The other’s absurd notion, so obviously a product of fear, had set Sharn into a high good humour. He did – Malravin was right there – feel much lighter than he had done; it made him light-headed.

‘Challenge,’ he said. ‘Challenge and response. The whole history of life can be related in those terms. That must go into the book. Those that do not respond go to the wall.’

‘It’s some sort of a nightmare, Eddy! What is that thing up there? It’s no sun! Come in here, for God’s sake!’ Malravin called from the safety of the air lock.

‘You fool, this is no dream or I’d be a figment of it, and you know that’s nonsense. You’re losing your head, that’s all.’

In his contempt for Malravin, he turned his back on the man, and began to stride over the plain. Each stride took him a long floating way. He switched off his intercom, and at once the fellow’s voice was cut out of existence. In the helmet fell a perfect peace.

He found he was not afraid to look up at the lumbering beast in the sky.

‘Put anything into words and it loses that touch of tabu to which fear attaches. That thing is a thing overhead. It may be some sort of a physical body. It may be some sort of a whirlpool operating in space in a way we do not yet understand. It may be an effect in space itself, caused by the stresses in the heart of a nebula. There must be all sorts of unexpected pressures there. So I put the thing into words and it ceases to worry me.’

He had got only to chapter four in the autobiography he was writing, but he saw that it would be necessary at some point – perhaps at the focal point of the book – to explain what prompted a man to go into deep space, and what sustained him when he got there. This experience on Erewhon was valuable, an intellectual experience as much as anything. It would be something to recall in the years to come – if that beast did not fall and squash him! It was leaping at him, directly overhead.

Again he was down full length, yelling into the dead microphone. He was too light to nuzzle properly, heavily, deeply, into the ground, and he cried his dismay till the helmet rang with sound.

He stopped the noise abruptly.

‘Got dizzy,’ he told himself. He shut his eyes, squeezing up his face to do so. ‘Don’t relax your control over yourself, Ed. Think of those fools in the ship, how they’d laugh. Remember nothing can hurt a man who has enough resilience.’ He opened his eyes. The next thing would be to get up. He switched on his helmet light

The ground was moving beneath him. For a while he stared fascinated at it. A light dust of grit and sand crawled over the solid rock at an unhurried but steady pace. He put his metal claw into it, and it piled against the barrier like water against a dam. Must be quite a wind blowing, Sharn told himself. Looking along the ground, he saw the particles trundled slowly towards the west. The west was veiled in the cloud-like atmosphere; into it, the great grinding shape of Big Bertha was sinking at a noticeable rate.

Now other fears overcame him. He saw Erewhon for what it was, a fragment of rock twirling over and over. He – the ship – the others – they clung to this bit of rock like flies, and – and – no, that was something he couldn’t face, not alone out here. Something else occurred to him. Planetoids as small as Erewhon did not possess atmospheres. So this atmosphere had been something else fairly recently; he saw it as an ice casing, embalming the rock. Suddenly, more than irrational fear made him want to run – there was a logical reason as well. He switched on his mike and began to shout as he stumbled back towards the ship: ‘I’m coming back, fellers, open up! Open up, I’m coming back!’

Some of the drive casing was off. Malravin’s feet protruded from the cluttered cavity. He was in there with an arc lamp, still patiently working on the directional cyboscope.

The other three sat round in bucket seats, talking. Sharn had changed his clothes, towelled himself down, and had a hot cup of Stimulous. Baron and the captain smoked mescahales.

‘We’ve established that Erewhon’s period of rotation is two hours, five minutes odd,’ Dominguey told Sharn. ‘That gives us about an hour of night when the ship is shielded from Big Bertha by the bulk of the planetoid. Sunset of the night after next will fall just before twenty hours, Galactic Mean. At twenty hours, all governmental ships keep open-listed for distress signals. Shielded from Bertha’s noise, we stand our best chance of contacting the Grandon and the Brinkdale then. There’s hope for us yet!’

Sharn nodded, Baron said, ‘You’re too much the optimist, Billy. Nobody can ever get to rescue us.’ He spoke in an amused, confident tone.

‘How’s that again?’

‘I said nobody can ever reach us, man. Consider it like this, man. We left ordinary space behind when we started burying into the nebula to get here. This little spot involves a number of paradoxes, doesn’t it? I mean, we agree that there’s nowhere else like this place in the universe, don’t we?’

‘No we don’t,’ Dominguey said. ‘We agree that in less than eleven hundred years of galactic exploration we have covered only a small section of one arm of one galaxy. We don’t know enough as yet to be capable of labelling an unusual situation paradoxical. Though I’ll agree it’s a poor spot for a picnic. Now, you were saying?’

‘Don’t try and be funny, Billy. This is not the place for humour – not even graveyard humour.’ Baron smiled as if the remark had a significance only he knew. He gestured with one hand, gracefully. ‘We are in a place that cannot possibly exist. That monstrous thing up in space cannot be a sun or any known body, or we would have got a spectroscopic reading from it. It cannot be a dead sun, or we would not see it as we do. This planetoid cannot be a planetoid, for in reality it would be so near Bertha it would be swept into it by irresistible gravitational forces. You were right to call it Erewhon. That’s what it is – Nowhere.’

Sharn spoke. ‘You’re playing with Malravin’s silly theory, Baron. You’re pretending we are in a nightmare. Let me assure you such assumptions are based entirely on withdrawal –’

‘I don’t want to hear!’ Baron said. The smile on his lips became gentler. ‘You wouldn’t understand, Sharn. You are so clever you prefer to tell me what I think rather than hear what I think. But I’m going to tell you what I think. I don’t think we are undergoing a nightmare. I think we are dead.’

Sharn rose, and began pacing behind his seat.

‘Dominguey, you don’t think this?’

‘I don’t feel dead.’

‘Good. Keep feeling that way or we’re going to be in trouble. You know what the matter is with Baron. He’s a weak character. He has always supported himself with science and the methods of science – we’ve had nothing but a diet of facts from him for the last thousand light years. Now he thinks science has failed him. There’s nothing else left. He can no longer face the physical world. So, he comes to this emotional conclusion that he is dead. Classic withdrawal symptoms.’

Dominguey said, ‘Someone ought to kick your ass, Eddy Sharn. Of all the glib and conceited idiots I ever met. … At least Jim has come out with an idea. It’s not so far-fetched at that, when you consider we know nothing about what happens after death. Think about it a bit, think about the first few moments of death. Try to visualise the period after heart action has ceased, when the body, and particularly the brain inside its skull case, still retains its warmth. What goes on then? Suppose in that period of time everything in the brain drains away into nothing like a bucket of water leaking into sand. Don’t you think some pretty vivid and hallucinatory things would happen inside that head? And, after all, the sort of events happening to us now are typical of the sort that might occur to spacers like us in that dying period. Maybe we ran smack into a big chunk of dead matter on our way into the Crab. Okay, we’re all dead – the strong feeling of helplessness we all have is a token of the fact that we are really strewn over the control cabin with the walls caved in.’

Lazily clapping his hands, Baron said, ‘You put it even better than I could have put it myself, Billy.’

‘Don’t think I believe what I am saying, though,’ Dominguey said grimly. ‘You know me, laddie: ever the funny man, even to death.’

He stood up and confronted Sharn.

‘What I am trying to say, Eddy, is that you are too fond of your own opinions. I know the way your mind works – you’re much happier in any situation if you can make yourself believe that the other people involved are inferior to you. Now then, if you have a theory that helps us tackle this particular section of hell, Jim and I would be pleased to hear it.’

‘Give me a mescahale,’ Sharn said. He had heard such outbursts from the captain before, and attributed them to Dominguey’s being less stable than he liked to pretend he was. Dominguey would be dangerous in a crisis. Not that this was less than a crisis. Sharn accepted the yellow cylinder, activated it, stuck it into his mouth, and sat down. Dominguey sat down beside him, regarding him with interest. They both smoked in silence.

‘Begin then, Eddy. It’s time we took a quick sleep, the lot of us. We’re all exhausted, and it’s beginning to show.’

‘On you maybe, Dominguey.’ He turned to Baron, languidly sunk in his chair.

‘Are you listening, Baron?’

Baron nodded his head.

‘Go ahead. Don’t mind me.’

Things would be so much simpler if one were a robot, Sharn thought. Personalities would not be involved. Any situation has to be situation plus character. It’s bad enough to be burdened with one’s own character; one has to put up with other people’s as well. He pulled out his little notebook to write the thought down, saw Dominguey was eyeing him, and began to speak abruptly.

‘What’s your silly fuss about? We’re here to do a job of observation – why not do it? Before Ike and I went outside, you told us to watch for the atmosphere. I did just that, but from the nonsense you talk about being dead I’d say you were the ones who should have watched it. And this peculiar bodily sensation – you let it rattle you. So did Ike – so did I – but it doesn’t take much knowledge to realise that the horrible sensation as if something were climbing about inside the suit with you has a rational and obvious explanation.’

Baron got up and walked away.

‘Come back when I’m talking, Baron,’ Sharn said, angrily.

‘I’m going to see how Malravin is getting on, then I’m going to bunk down. If you have anything interesting to say, Billy can give it to me in a nutshell later. Your double talk holds nothing for me. I’m tired of your speeches.’

‘Tired? – When you’re dead? Needing to bunk down? – When you’re dead?’

‘Leave him, for God’s sake, and get on with what you were saying,’ Dominguey said with a yawn. ‘Look, Eddy, we’re in a nasty spot here – I don’t just mean stuck on Erewhon, though that’s bad enough. But much more getting on each other’s nerves and there will be murder done. I’d say you were turning into a very good candidate for the axe.’

‘You toying with the idea of murder, Dominguey? I suppose that could be another refuge from the realities of the position.’

‘Knock off that line of talk, Sharn, and that’s an order. You were talking about this strange bodily sensation we felt out on the rock. Don’t be so coy about it. It’s caused by the fact that most of our weight out there comes by courtesy of Big Bertha, not Erewhon. Your mass orients itself partly according to where Bertha is, and not according to the body you are standing on. Of course it causes some odd sensations, particularly with respect to your proprioceptors and the balance in your inner ear. When the sun first rises, your intellect has to fight your body out of its tendency to regard the east as down. When the sun’s overhead, the situation’s not so bad, but your mass will always act as a compass, as it were, tending towards the sun – if Bertha is a sun. Have I taken the words out of your mouth?’

Sharn nodded.

‘Since you’re so smart, Billy, you’ve probably worked out that Bertha is a star – a big star … a star, that is, with an abnormally large mass. And I do mean abnormally – it’s got an unique chance to grow here. It has accumulated bulk from the nebula. Its mass must be something above twenty-five million times the mass of Sol.’

Dominguey whistled. ‘A pretty tall order! Though I see it is well placed for stellar growth processes. So you think it is just a gigantic accumulation of dead matter?’

‘Not at all. There’s no such thing as dead matter in that sense. Baron’s the scientist – he’d tell you if he wasn’t heading for catatonia. You get such a mass of material together and terrific pressures are set up. No, I’m saying Bertha is a tremendous live sun built from dead nebular matter.’

‘That’s all nonsense, though, Eddy. We don’t even see it properly except as a shimmering blackness. If your theory were correct, Bertha would be a white giant. We’d all be scorched out of existence, sitting here so close to it.’

‘No, you’re forgetting your elementary relativity. I’ve worked this out. This is no fool hypothesis. I said Bertha had twenty-five million times Sol’s mass for a good reason. Because if you have a sun that big, the force of gravity at its surface is so colossal that even light cannot escape off into space.’

Dominguey put his mescahale down and stared at the nearest bulkhead with his mouth open.

‘By the saints … Eddy, could that be so? What follows from that? I mean, is there any proof?’

‘There’s the visible distortion of distant starlight by Bertha’s bulk that gives you some idea of the gravitational forces involved. And the interferometer offers some guide. It’s still working. I used it out on the surface before I came back aboard. Why didn’t you try it? I suppose you and Baron panicked out there, as Malravin did? Bertha has an angular diameter of twenty-two degrees of arc. If the mass is as I say, then you can reckon its diameter in miles. Should be 346 times the sun’s, or about some 300 million miles. That’s presuming a lot, I know, but it gives us a rough guide. And from there a spot of trig will tell you how far we are from Bertha. I make it something less than one billion six hundred million miles. You know what that means – we’re as far from Bertha as Uranus is from Sol, which with a body of Bertha’s size means we’re very nearly on top of it!’

‘Now you’re beginning to frighten me,’ Dominguey said. He looked frightened, dark skin stretched over his cheekbones as he pressed his temples with his fingertips. Behind them, Baron and Malravin were quarrelling. Baron had tripped over the other’s foot as he lay with his head in the drive box, and they were having a swearing match. Neither Dominguey nor Sharn paid them any attention.

‘No, there’s one hole in your theory,’ Dominguey finally said.

‘Such as?’

‘Such as if Erewhon was as close as that to its primary, it could never hold its orbit. It would be drawn into Bertha.’

Sharn stared at the captain, mulling over his answer. Life was a misery, but there was always some pleasure to be wrung from the misery.

‘I got the answer to that when I was outside rolling on the sterile stinking rockface,’ he said. ‘The vapour came pouring over the ground at me. I knew Erewhon was too small to retain any atmosphere for any length of time. In fact it was diffusing into space fast. Therefore, not so long ago, that atmosphere was lying in hollows on the surface, liquid. Follow me?’

Dominguey swallowed and said, ‘Go on.’

‘You made the assumption that Erewhon bore a planetary relationship to Bertha, Dominguey. You were wrong. Erewhon is spinning in from a colder region. The rocks are heating up. We haven’t settled on a planetoid – we’re squatting on a hunk of rock spiralling rapidly into the sun.’

There came the sound of a blow, and Malravin grunted. He jumped at Baron and the two men clinched, pummelling each other’s backs rather foolishly. Dominguey and Sharn ran up and pulled them apart. Dead or not, Baron was giving a fair account of himself.

‘All right,’ Dominguey said angrily. ‘So we’ve run ourselves ragged. We need sleep. You three bunk down, give yourselves sedatives. I’ll get on fixing the cybo, Malravin. Set the alarm signal for nineteen hours fifty, G.M., so that we don’t miss calling Grandon and Brinkdale, and bunk down. We want to get out of here – and we all want to get out of here. Go on, move – you too, Eddy. Your theory has me convinced. We’re leaving as soon as possible, so I’m having peace while I work.’

In turn they all protested, but Dominguey was not to be over-ruled. He stood with his hands on his hips, his dark face unmoving as they climbed into their bunks. Then he shrugged, set the alarm on the communication panel, and crawled into the drive compartment.

It was not a matter of simple replacement. Fortunately they had spares for the little sinecells which studded the main spiral of the cyboscope that steered the ship. But the spiral itself had become warped by the extra strains placed on it during their penetration of the nebula. Malravin had drained its oil bath and removed its casing, but the business of setting it back into true was a slow precision job, not made easier by the awkward angle at which it had to be tackled.

Time passed. Dominguey was listening to the sound of his own heavy breathing when the alarm bell shrilled.

He crawled out into the cabin. Sharn and Malravin were already rousing and stretching.

‘That’s four hours’ hard grind I just put in,’ he said, pushing his words through a yawn. ‘Eddy, see if you can raise the other ships, will you? I must have a drink and get some shut eye. We’re nearly set to blast off.’

Then he pointed to Baron, his ashen face, the crimson stain over his chest. In two steps he was over to his bunk. Baron lay contorted on his left side, gripping a handful of blanket. He was dead with a knife in his ribs. Dominguey let out a cry that brought the other two down onto their feet.

‘He’s been murdered! Jim’s been murdered! One of you two. …’ He turned to Sharn. ‘Sharn, you did this. You’ve killed him with his own explorer’s knife. Why? Why?’

Sharn had gone as pale as Dominguey.

‘You’re lying, I never did it. I was in my bunk asleep! I had no quarrel with Baron. What about Malravin? He’d just had a fight with Jim. He did it, didn’t you, Malravin?’

The alarm was still shrilling away. They were all shouting. Malravin said, ‘Don’t you call me a murderer. I was fast asleep in my bunk, under sedation as ordered. One of you two did it. It was nothing to do with me.’

‘You’ve got a black eye coming on, Malravin,’ Dominguey said. ‘Jim Baron gave you that before you hit the sack. Did you stab him to even up the score?’

‘For God’s sake, man, let’s try and raise the other ships while we’ve the chance. You know I’d not do anything like that. You did it yourself, most likely. You were awake, we weren’t.’

‘I was stuck with my head in the drive all the time.’

‘Were you? How do we know?’

‘Yes, he has a point, Dominguey,’ Sharn said. ‘How do we know what you were up to? Didn’t you arrange for us all to get a bit of sleep on purpose, so that you could bring this off?’

‘So he did, the filthy murderer,’ Malravin shouted. ‘I wonder you didn’t finish us all while you were about it.’ Putting his hands up, he charged at Dominguey.

Dominguey ducked. He jumped to one side and hit Malravin as he lumbered past. The blow was a light one. It served merely to make Malravin bellow and come on again. On the table lay a wrench they had used earlier on the cybo casing. Dominguey hit Malravin with it at the base of the neck. The big fellow collided with a chair and sprawled with it to the floor, catching his head sharply against the bulkhead as he went.

‘You want any?’ Dominguey asked, facing Sharn with the wrench ready.

Shaking, Sharn formulated the word ‘No’.

‘See to Ike then, while I try to raise a signal.’ Nodding curtly, he went over to the communications panel and cut off the alarm. The sudden silence was as chilling as the racket had been a moment before. He opened up the subradio and began to call.

Sharn slipped to his knees and pulled Malravin’s head up as gently as he could. The man did not stir. Groaning, Sharn tried to adjust to what had happened. He tried to concentrate his thoughts. He muttered, ‘Humans instigate events; events affect humans. Once a man has started a chain of events, he may find himself the victim of the events. When I entered star service, this was a decisive action, but readers may think that since then I have been at the mercy – the mercy –’

He began to weep. Malravin was also dead. His neck was broken. Inside his head, still warm, thoughts pouring out into oblivion. …

After some indefinite period of time, Sharn realised that Dominguey had stopped speaking. Only a meaningless gibber and squeak of static came from the subradio. He looked up. The captain was pointing an iongun at him.

‘I know you killed Jim Baron, Sharn,’ he said. His face was distorted by tension.

‘I know you killed Malravin. I saw you do it, and there is the murder weapon on the floor.’

The iongun wavered.

‘Ike’s dead?’

‘Dead, just as you killed Baron. You’re clever, Dominguey, the real silent superman type, always in command of his environment. Now I suppose you will kill me. With three bodies out of the hatch, the Wilson will lift a lot more easily, won’t it? You’ll need all that lift, Dominguey, because we are getting nearer to Bertha every minute.’

‘I’m not going to kill you, Sharn, just as I didn’t kill Baron. Just as killing Malravin was an accident. You know – Wait! Don’t move! There’s a signal.’

He slightly swivelled his chair and turned up the volume of the set. Below the crackle of static, a faint voice called them. It said, ‘Can you hear me, Wilson? Can you hear me, Wilson? Grant of the Brinkdale here. Come in, please.’

‘Hello, Grant! Hello, Grant!’ As he spoke, the captain moved the mike so that he could continue to cover Sharn with his iongun. ‘Dominguey of Wilson here. We’re down on an asteroid for repairs. If I send a carrier, will you get a fix on us? Situation very urgent – dawn is less than an hour away, and static will cancel reception then.’

Far away, down a great well of time and space, a tiny voice asked for the carrier wave. Dominguey switched to send and turned to face Sharn.

Sharn still crouched over Malravin. He had brought himself under control now.

‘Going to finish me at once, Dominguey?’ he asked. ‘Don’t want any witnesses, do you?’

‘Get up, Sharn. Back over to the wall. I want to see if Malravin is really dead, or if you are up to some stupid deception.’

‘Oh, he’s dead all right. I’d say you did a very good job. And with Baron too, although there it was easier because the poor fellow was not only asleep but believed himself already dead.’

‘You’re sick, Sharn. Get over against that wall when you’re ordered to.’

They moved into their new positions, Sharn by the wall near the shuttered ports, Dominguey by the ugly body on the floor. Both of them moved slowly, watching each other, their faces blank.

‘He’s dead all right,’ Sharn said.

‘He’s dead. Sharn, get into your space suit.’

‘What are you planning, a burial service? You’re crazy, Dominguey! It’s only a few hours before our mass cremation.’

‘Don’t you call me crazy, you little snake. Get into your space suit. I can’t have you in here while I’m working. I don’t trust you. I know you killed Baron; you’re mad and he had less patience with your talk and theories than any of us. You can’t tolerate anyone who won’t enlist as your audience, can you? But you’re not going to kill me. So you wait outside until we are ready to go, or until the Brinkdale comes to pick us up, whichever is soonest. Move fast now, man, into your suit.’

‘You’re going to leave me out there, you swine! What are you doing, compiling an anthology of ways to murder in galactic space? Beyond the solar system, the word of man becomes the word of God.’

Moving fast, Dominguey slapped him across the cheek.

‘– And the hand of God,’ Sharn muttered. He moved towards his suit. Reluctantly, he climbed into it, menaced continually by the iongun. Dominguey propelled him towards the lock.

‘Don’t send me out there again, Dominguey, please. I can’t stand it. You know what Big Bertha’s like – Please! Tie me to my bunk –’

‘Move, man. I have to get back to the set. I won’t leave without you.’

‘Please, Dominguey, Captain, I swear I’m innocent. You know I never touched Baron. I’d die out there on the rock! Forgive me!’

‘You can stay if you’ll sign a confession that you murdered Baron.’

‘You know I never did it! You did it while we were all asleep. You saw how his idea about our all being dead was a menace to the general sanity, and so you killed him. Or Malravin killed him. Yes, Malravin killed Jim, Dominguey, it’s obvious! You know we were talking together while they were quarrelling! We’re not to blame. Let’s not be at each other’s throats now we’re the only two left. We’ve got to get out of here quickly – you need help. We always get on well together, we’ve covered the galaxy –’

‘Confess or get out, Sharn. I know you did it. I can’t have you’ in here or you’ll kill me.’

Sharn stopped protesting. He ran a hand through his damp hair and leant back against the bulkhead.

‘All right. I’ll sign. Anything rather than go out there again. I can always say I signed under duress.’

Dominguey dragged him to the table, seized a scratch pad from the radio bench, and forced Sharn to write out a brief confession to the murder of Jim Baron. He pocketed it and levelled the iongun again.

‘Now get outside,’ he said.

‘Dominguey, no, no, you lied to me – please –’

‘You’ve got to get out, Sharn. With this paper in my pocket, you’d not hesitate to kill me now, given half a chance.’

‘You’re mad, Dominguey, cunning mad. You’re going to get rid of me and then blame it all onto me –’

‘I’ll count five, Sharn. If you’re not on your way to that lock by then, I swear I’ll fry your boots off.’

The look on his face was unmistakable. Sharn backed into the lock, weeping. The door closed on him. He heard Dominguey begin to exhaust the air from the room panel. Hurriedly, he screwed down his faceplate. The air whispered away and the lock descended to ground level.

When it stopped, he opened the door, unscrewed one of the levers from the control panel, and wedged it in the doorway so that the door could not close. It could not retract until it was closed, so his way to the ship was not withdrawn. Then he stepped out onto the surface of Erewhon for a second time.

Conditions were changing. Bertha came ripping up into the sky, surrounded by a shock wave of star-blur. The farther stars lent it a halo of confused light. It was rising ahead of the time-table the humans had worked out. So communication with Brinkdale would now be effectively cut off. Also, the perceptible disc of the body was larger. They were indeed falling towards it.

Sharn wondered why he was not already fried to smears of carbohydrate on the rock, despite the refrigeration unit in his suit. But if Bertha was so gigantic, then she would not even be able to release her own heat. What a terrible unstable thing it was! He looked up at it, in a sort of ecstasy transcending fear, feeling in his lack of weight that he was drifting out towards it. The black globe seemed to thunder overhead, a symbol – a symbol of what? Of life, of fertility, of death, of destruction? It seemed to combine aspects of all things as it rode omnipotently overhead.

‘The core of experience – to be at the core of experience transcends the need for lesser pleasures,’ Sharn told himself. He could feel his black notebook in his hip pocket. It was inaccessible inside the space-suit. For all his inability to get at it, it might as well have been left back on Earth. That was a terrible loss – not just to him, but to others who might have read and been stimulated by his work. Words were coming to him now, thick and rich as blood, coming first singly like birds alighting on his shoulder, then in swarms.

Finally he fell silent, impaled under that black gaze. The isolation was so acute, it was as if he alone of all creation had been singled out to stand there … there under something that was physically impossible.

He switched on his suit mike and began to speak to Dominguey.

‘I want to come back aboard. I want to make some calculations. I’m beginning to understand Bertha. Her properties represent physical impossibilities. You understand that, don’t you, Dominguey? So how can she exist? The answer must be that beneath her surface, under unimaginable conditions, she is creating anti-matter. We’ve made a tremendous discovery, Dominguey. Perhaps they’ll name the process after me: the Sharn Effect. Let me come back, Dominguey. …’

But he spoke to himself, and the words were lost in his helmet.

He stood mute, bowing to the black thing.

Already Bertha was setting. The foggy blanket of atmosphere was whipped off the bed of rock, following, following the sun round like a tide. The vapour was thinner now, and little more than shoulder high as its component molecules drained off into space.

The weight-shift took place. Sharn’s body told him that down was the monstrous thing on the horizon and that he walked like a fly on the wall across Erewhon. Though he fought the sensation, when he turned back towards the Wilson, he moved uphill, and the vapours poured across him in a dying waterfall.

Taking no notice of the vapours, Sharn lumbered back to the air lock. He had remembered the thick pad of miostrene that hung clipped to one wall of the lock, a stylo beside it. It was placed there for emergencies, and surely this was one. As he reached for it, Dominguey’s voice came harshly through his headphones.

‘Stay away from that lock, Sharn. I’ve got the casing back on the cyboscope and am preparing to blast off. I shall have to take a chance on manoeuvring. Get away from the ship!’

‘Don’t leave without me, Dominguey, please! You know I’m an innocent man.’

‘We’re none of us innocent, Sharn, isn’t that true?’

‘This is no time for metaphysics, Dominguey. We’ll discuss it when you let me back inside.’

‘You killed Jim Baron, Sharn, and I’m not letting you back on board in case you kill me.’

‘I didn’t kill Baron, and you know it. I’m not the killer type. Either you killed him, or else Malravin did. It wasn’t me.’

‘I’ve got your confession! Stand clear for blast-off!’

‘But I’ve made an important discovery!’

‘Stand clear!’

The connection went dead. Sharn cried into his suit. Only the universe answered.

Clutching the miostrene pad, he ran from the lock. He ran after the last disappearing strand of vapour, sucked along the ground like a worm withdrawing. He lumbered down a cliff that began to see-saw back towards horizontal. The big sun had disappeared below a group of rocks that did rough duty for a horizon.

A tower of distorted strata rose before him. He stooped behind it as quickly as the suit would allow him, and looked back.

A golden glow turned white, a plump pillow of smoke turned into flat sheets of vapour that flapped across the rock towards him, the ship rose. Almost at once, it was hidden behind the northern horizon. The movement was so sudden and unpredictable that Sharn thought it had crashed, until he realised how fast ship and planetoid were moving in relation to each other. He never caught another glimpse of it.

Calmer now, he stood up and looked round. In the rock lay a great crater. The last of the smoke was sucked into it. He hobbled over to it and looked down. A great eye looked back at him.

Sharn staggered away in alarm, running through the passages of his mind to see if delusion had entered there. Then he realised what he had seen. Erewhon was a thin slab of rock holed right through the middle. He had seen Bertha louring on the other side. In a minute, it would rise again in its tireless chase of this splinter of flotsam.

Now the illusion of day and night, with its complementary implication that one was on a planet or planetoid, was shattered. That great eye held truth in its gaze: he clung to an infinitesimal chunk of rock falling ever faster towards its doom.

As he squatted down with his pad, the sun came up again. It rushed across the arch of space and disappeared almost at once. Erewhon bore no trace of any vapour to follow it now. And another illusion was gone: now, plainly, it was the chunk of rock that turned, not the mighty ball that moved – that was stationary, and all space was full of it. It hung there like a dull shield, inviting all comers.

He began to write on his pad in big letters. ‘As this rock is stripped of all that made it seem like a world, so I become a human stripped of all my characteristics. I am as bare as a symbol myself. There are no questions relevant to me; you cannot ask me if I murdered a man on a ship; I do not know; I do not remember. I have no need for memory. I only know what it is to have the universe’s grandest grandstand view of death. I –’

But the rock was spinning so fast now that he had to abandon the writing. A spiral of black light filled space, widening as he drew nearer to Bertha. He lay back on the rock to watch, to stretch his nerves to the business of watching, holding on as his weight pulsed about him in rhythm with the black spiral.

As he flung the pad aside, the last word on it caught his eye, and he flicked an eyebrow in recognition of its appositeness:

‘I –’