E. C. Tubb
Carl possessed everything of prosaic luxury he could desire for his voyage to the stars. As the natural leader with overriding authority he could enjoy himself in his own way across the light years. Perhaps, had he been a little more ambitious ...
* * * *
Consciousness rose like a bubble to burst in a rainbow shimmer of expanding awareness; the touch of sheets, the scent of hair, the warmth of a female body close to his own. Other things; the familiar sight of his cabin, the clock with crystal glitters, the wardrobe filled with soft fabrics. And yet more; the low susuration of voices, a murmur barely heard and still less understood.
‘It must surely be obvious that for any man to suffer immolation will result in total withdrawal and inevitable insanity.’
‘True, but as long as the sensory perceptions are stimulated the ego will look outward, not inward. Insanity is, after all, only a matter of cultural definition.’
Carter and Loomis? He felt a sudden rage, quickly dying. The voices were dull; but the content was familiar. Always they argued on matters of abstruse psychology as if finding intellectual satisfaction in the mouthing of long words. And the voices could belong to no one else - they were far too deep to have belonged to the rest of the crew.
‘Honey.’ Alice turned, waking, snuggling against him, eyes closed, hands groping like blind kittens, their touch warm and velvet. ‘Honey?’
‘No.’
‘Please!’
‘Up,’ he said. Time to get moving.’
Dressed, he entered the dining hall. Four faces looked at him, two male, two female; all rose and smiled in greeting.
‘Good morning, Carl. Have a good night?’
‘Sleep well?’
‘You look a mite peaked, Carl. Did Alice take it out of you?’
That was Carter, round, suet-pudding of a face wreathed in a smile, pudgy hands lifting as if he were a priest giving benediction. Seated beside him Loomis, his twin, echoed the suggestive snigger. One day, Carl decided, he would do something about the pair. Something peculiarly horrible.
Alice came from behind him and took her place at the table. She was silent as she ate, eyes downcast, knowing it was time for a change and yet hating the thought of losing her favoured position. Yet it would come again, he silently promised, watching the sheen of her long, blonde hair, the curve of her cheek. Gwen, hair as dark as midnight, spooned marmalade on toast and nibbled at the crusty morsel.
‘Couldn’t we increase the size of the play court?’ she asked. ‘We could knock down one of the bulkheads and make one big room instead of two smaller ones. I’m dying for a game of tennis.’
‘No structural alterations of any kind are permitted,’ said Loomis automatically. ‘Be content with what you’ve got.’
‘Which is?’
‘A damned sight more than anything you were used to before you joined this crew.’ Alice was sharp, spiteful, even white teeth flashing like those of a fox. ‘If you want to get rid of excess energy how about cleaning the ship?’
‘Be quiet, you two!’ Cynthia was a red-head and had a temper to match. ‘Cleaning is taken in turn. Right, Carl?’,
He smiled, enjoying his supremacy, his position of power. Girls, he thought, they always like to be close to the one in authority. But he had to play fair.
‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘Alice cleans the ship. Loomis?’
‘Check all systems.’
‘Monitor the sensors,’ said Carter.
Cynthia hesitated. ‘Void all waste matter.’
‘Tally the stores,’ said Gwen.
‘Then do it,’ said Carl.
* * * *
It was routine; a matter of moving from one part of the ship to another, checking, testing, seeing that everything was as it should be and that nothing had gone wrong. But nothing could go wrong - the concept was unthinkable.
Back in the recreation room they settled to take care of the rest of the day. Carter and Gwen played chess, the others made up a four at bridge. The cards were shining-clean, crisp to the fingers, the surfaces unworn.
The sound of their bids echoed like the chime of bells.
‘One club,’ said Loomis.
‘Two diamonds,’ said Alice.
‘Three clubs,’ said Cynthia.
‘Four no trumps,’ said Carl.
He won, he always won, the others by now owed him a sum greater than the national debt. One day, perhaps, he would collect.
Bored he rose and went forward to where the great screens showed the eternal vista of the stars. For a long time he studied them, wondering how far they had come, how much further they would have to go. Years? Decades? It was possible; but what of it? They were comfortable in their haven. The showers always ran hot and cold, the food was delicious, the company mostly pleasant and, when it wasn’t, he could quickly bring it back into line.
He turned at a faint noise. Cynthia was standing just behind him, the expression in her eyes unmistakable.
‘Carl,’ she murmured. ‘When is it going to be my turn again? Loomis is—’ Her arms circled his body and dragged him close to her warm contours. ‘Carl?’
He struggled against her arms. They clutched even tighter.
‘Carl!’ Her voice had deepened, grown thick and demanding. The white gleam of fangs showed behind the full redness of her lips. They touched his throat, nipped, began to penetrate the skin. ‘I need you, Carl. I need you!’
He twisted, feeling pain at his throat, thrusting the woman from him with a jerk of his arms. For a moment the control room wheeled in a circle of brilliant glitters then it steadied and was as before.
‘Carl?’ The woman looked at him and was just that - a woman pleading to be loved.
‘Later,’ he said, and walked from the place of star-bright screens and watchful dials.
He heard the murmur as he entered the recreation room. Carter and Loomis, heads together, muttering their endless litany of esoteric knowledge. They parted as he approached.
‘Carl?’
‘Alice,’ he snapped. ‘I want her. Where is she?’
Carter blinked. ‘Alice?’
‘Yes, Alice, you fool!’
Loomis cleared his throat. ‘Carl, who is Alice?’
* * * *
One day, thought Carl, I will kill him. I will take him and spread him out, split him down the middle and open his guts to the sky. The sky and the waiting vultures. Him and Carter both. I will get the pair of them all in my own good time.
‘Alice,’ said Loomis. ‘Of course. Let’s go and find her.’
She wasn’t to be found.
Somehow she had vanished from the ship - but how? The tell-tales showed that no port had been opened and, anyway, they couldn’t be opened from anywhere but the control room and then only after long and tedious formalities. But she wasn’t in the recreation room, the dining room, the swimming pool, the showers, the kitchens, the theatre, the shooting range, the play room, the library, the laboratory, the conservatory, the observatory. She wasn’t in the bedrooms, the dark room, the music room. Nor on the promenade. She had simply vanished.
Or had been made to vanish.
Carl thought about it as, the others at his heels, he strode through the echoing vastness of the ship. One or more of the others must have killed her and disposed of her body. But that too was impossible. A human body held a lot of meat, a lot of blood and bone. To pass it through the voider would take time and leave stains. There had been no time and there were no stains. Yet she could not be found.
Back in the recreation room Cynthia said, ‘Could something have come aboard? An invisible something from out there?’ The movement of her hand signalled the great emptiness beyond the hull.
‘Impossible!’ Carter was firm. ‘If such a thing was intangible enough to pass through metal then it would have been too insubstantial to snare a human being. And, even if something could have managed to enter the ship, how could it have taken Alice out?’
‘It could have dematerialized her,’ said Gwen. ‘It could have extended the matter of her material being until it had achieved a permeable tenuosity.’
‘That means we must have breathed in a part of her body,’ said Loomis. He was thoughtful. ‘In a sense we have incorporated her into ourselves.’
‘A closed, feed-back cycle,’ agreed Carter. ‘She is us and we are her. That means we must all share her appetite. Shall we eat?’
‘No,’ said Carl.
He was, naturally, obeyed.
* * * *
That evening Cynthia died.
It was evening only by convention, there was no real time aboard the vessel, but the habit of regular hours was a psychological necessity in order to maintain the workings of the biological clock. Carl heard the scream, the thick slobbering giggle, saw the horror as he burst into the kitchen.
Gwen stood over a moaning figure, a knife in her hand. As she saw him she stooped and plunged it into Cynthia’s body. A fountain of blood spurted from the ripped abdomen, staining her dress, painting her face into a devil’s mask. Giggling she threw aside the knife and draped her neck with smoking entrails. Kneeling she thrust her face into the puddle of blood oozing from the gaping wound.
‘My God!’ Carter turned away, retching. ‘No! No, I didn’t mean - for God’s sake do something!’
‘It has all been taken care of.’ Loomis, with his bland, hateful face, his too-ready smile. ‘The trauma will not last and soon the conviction that all is normal will overwhelm the sense of disorientation. There is no need for concern.’
Carl knocked him aside, slamming the kitchen door and locking it as he cut off the sight of the horror within. Sweating he stood against the panel, heard the thud from the other side, doubled as pain lanced his side to blur his vision with spinning darkness. Dimly he heard the thick, inhuman voice, snarling an impotent rage.
‘I’ll get you! I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do! You won’t get away with this, damn you! You sadistic perverts! You monsters! You filthy, degenerate swine! I’ll make you pay for what you’ve done to me!’
His voice, and then another, cool, hatefully calm.
‘Steady now, Carl. Just relax and take it easy.’
Carter stood before him, smiling, something bright and shining in his hand. He lifted it, aimed, thrust it directly into Carl’s neck. Pain from the lacerated throat merged with the dull agony in his side. He tried to run and fell to lie sprawled on the floor looking up at the two men.
‘An expected reaction,’ said Loomis with chill detachment.
‘Beneficial?’
‘Unfortunately, no, but it will pass. Everything will pass. A hundred years from now and all will be forgotten.’
‘Damn you!’ Carl climbed painfully to his feet. His legs felt numb, dead, appendages without feeling or function. He blinked to clear his eyes of crystal glitters, feeling a new terror. ‘The ship!’ he gasped. ‘Something is wrong with the ship!’
Loomis smiled, his head shrinking, to grow round and studded with eyes. His body dropped, sprouted legs, grew a thick, ugly covering tufted with sparse fur. On multiple legs the spider scuttled up the wall to hang watching with glittering eyes.
‘Carter!’ He turned to the other man. ‘Help me, damn you. Help me!’
‘To do what, Carl?’
‘To get out of here, man. What else? To get out of here!’
Solemnly Carter shook his head.
* * * *
‘I’m afraid that is quite impossible, Carl. After all you did volunteer, and surely this is better than spending your life in a cell? Five years, perhaps less, and you will be free. Just five, short years. And you will not suffer, I promise you that.’
‘You bastard! I didn’t know. I didn’t guess! For God’s sake get me out of here!’
He ran from the empty smile, racing through endless corridors, endless rooms, running until the breath rasped in his lungs and his muscles trembled with exhaustion. Finally he halted to stare at a black loathsome body, a smiling mask which gently swayed from side to side.
‘I told you,’ said Carter. ‘It is quite impossible to escape. Now why not be sensible and make the best of things? The connections are all made and cannot be unmade. And think of the adventure!’
‘You said five years?’
‘Maybe a little more; but it will be your time, Carl, not ours. We shall all be dead by then. But you will be expected and science will have progressed far enough then to do what we cannot. So have hope, my friend. Hope... hope... hope ...’
Hope!
The name of the ship.
The only thing left to him.
The only promise to be found in a universe of pain and terror, the machinations of science and the bleakness of despair.
To hope and to continue hoping for now and forever.
But first must come revenge.
He flung himself at the smiling face, hands reaching to rip and tear, to maim and to kill. Beneath his hands Carter moaned and then began to melt, to fall and end in a thin, oozing mat of slime on the floor. From the slime lifted a hundred grasping hands, a thousand sprouting eyes, ten thousand gaping mouths all gusting an acrid vapour.
Blinded, terrified, he ran from the scene, slammed into a bulkhead, turned and again met the stunning impact of unyielding metal. When next he threw himself forward he felt the bite of strands about his limbs, the constricting material of a web holding him close, closer, binding him tight until he could hardly breathe and found it impossible to move.
On the wall the spider moved, swinging from side to side, spinning, becoming a blurred circle of eye-bright glitters which grew and grew until there was nothing in the universe but the overwhelming, hypnotic shimmer.
* * * *
Carl groaned and looked at the thing just above his face, at the wheeling points of light, bright and clean in their random motion. He could see, in the reflection of the stainless steel eighteen inches above, the lined and ravaged face, the complex helmet with the trailing wires, the pipes buried in his arms and throat, the thick cables sprouting from the support cradling his head.
The cables wired into the ‘dead’ areas of his brain, the nine tenths for which the only use was to function now as the living computer of the ship. His ship. The Hope of which he was the guiding part.
The probe sent out to circle a distant star and to return to Earth - one day.
Rolling his eyes he could see, just to one side, the cause of the breakdown. Drifting globules had already sealed the tiny hole but the damage had been done. A tiny meteor had penetrated the hull and smashed the dream-mechanism on which his sanity depended.
Now there would be no more dreams, no women, no company, no illusion of space and gracious living.
There would be nothing but the endless years in which, locked in a metal coffin, he would go inevitably and totally insane.
But he wouldn’t die. The machines would see to that.
* * * *