A Hitch In Space. Fritz Leiber.

Hmn. This guy's getting a bit weird...

Fritz Leiber

 

A HITCH IN SPACE

Worlds of Tomorrow, August 1963.

My Space-partner was a good reliable sidekick—but his partner was something else.

Once when I was doing a hitch with the Shaulan Space Guard out Scorpio way, my partner Jeff Bogart developed just about the most harmless psychosis you could imagine: he got himself an imaginary companion.

  And the imaginary companion turned out to be me.

  Well, I’m a pretty nice guy and so having two of me in the ship didn’t seem a particularly bad idea. At first. In fact there’d be advantages of it, I thought. For instance, Jeff liked to talk a weary lot ... and the imaginary Joe Hansen could spell me listening to him, while I projected a book or just harkened to the wheels going around in my own head against the faint patter of starlight on the hull.

  I met Jeff first at a space-rodeo, oddly enough, but now the two of us were out on a servicing check of the orbital beacons and relays and rescue depots of the five planets of the Shaulan system. A completely routine job, its only drawback that it was lengthy. Our ship was an ionic jeep that looked like a fancy fountain pen, but was very roomy for three men—one of them imaginary.

  I caught on to Jeff’s little mania by overhearing him talking to me. I’d be coming back from the head or stores or linear accelerator or my bunk, and I’d hear him yakking at me. It embarrassed me the first time, how to go back into the cabin when the other me was there. But I just swam in, and without any transition-strain at all that I could observe Jeff looked around at me, smiling sort of glaze-eyed, and said warmly, “Joe. My buddy Joe. Am I glad they paired us.”

  If Jeff had a major fault, as opposed to a species of nuttiness, it was that he was strictly a speak-only-good, positive-thinking guy who always deferred to me. Even idolized me, if you can imagine that. He’d give me such fulsome praise I’d be irked ten times an orbit.

 Another thing that helped me catch on was that he always called the other me Joseph.

At first I thought the whole thing might be a gag, or maybe a deliberate way of letting off steam against me without violating his always-a-sweet-guy code—like happy husbands cursing in the bathroom—but then came the scrambled eggs.

  I’d slept late and when I squinted into the cabin there was Jeff hovering over a plate of yellow fluff and shaking his finger at my empty seat and saying, “Dammit, Joseph, eat your scrambled eggs, I cooked ’em ’specially for you,” and when he crawfished out toward the galley a couple seconds later he was saying, “Now you start on those eggs, Joseph, before I get back.”

  I thought for a bit and then I slid into my place and polished them off.

  When he floated in with the coffee he gave me another of those glaze-eyed God-fearing looks—but just a mite disappointed, I thought—and said, “Dammit, Joe, you’re perfect! You always clean your plate.”

  Apparently when I was there, Joseph just didn’t exist for Jeff. And vice versa. It was sort of eerie, especially with the hum of space in my ears like a seashell and nobody else for five million miles.

  Beginning with the scrambled eggs, I discovered that Jeff didn’t exactly idolize Joseph—or even take with him the attitude of “My buddy can do no wrong,” like he did with me. I overheard him criticizing Joseph. Reasonably at first; then I heard him chewing him out—next bullying him.

  It made me wistful, that last, thinking how good it would feel to be full-bloodedly cursed to my face once in a while instead of all the sweetness and light. And right there I got the idea for some amateur therapy, Shaula-Deva help me.

  I waited for a moment when we were both relaxed and then I said, “Jeff, the trouble with you is you’re too nice. You ought to criticize things more. For a starter, criticize me. Tell me my faults. Go ahead.”

  He flushed a little and said, “Dammit, Joe, how can I? You’re perfect!”

  “No man is perfect, Jeff,” I told him solemnly, feeling pretty foolish.

  “But you’re my buddy I always can trust,” he protested, squirming a bit. “I wish you wouldn’t talk this way.”

***

“Jeff, you can’t trust anybody too far,” I said. “Even good guys can do bad things. When I was a boy there was a kid named Harry I practically worshipped. We lived on a pioneer world of Fomalhaut that had good snow, and we’d hitch rides with our sleds off little airscrew planes taking off. We’d each have a long white line on his sled and loop it beforehand around the plane’s tail-gear and back to the sled. Then we’d hide. As soon as the pilot got aboard we’d jump on our sleds and each grab the free end of his line and have one comet of a ride, until the plane took off. Then we’d quick let go.

  “Well, one frosty morning I let go and nothing happened, except I started to rise. Harry had tied the free end of my line tight to my sled.

  “I could have just rolled off, I suppose, but I didn’t want to lose my sled or my line either. Luckily I had a sheath knife handy and I used it. I even made a whizeroo of a landing. But ever afterwards my feelings toward Harry—”

  “Stop it, please, Joe!” Jeff interrupted, very red in the face and shaking a little. “That boy Harry was utterly evil. And I don’t want to hear any more about this, or anything like it, ever again. Understand?”

  I told him sure I did. Heck, I could see I’d gone the wrong way about it. I even begged his pardon.

  After that I just sweated it out. But I found I couldn’t spend much time on books or my thoughts, I’d keep listening for what Jeff was saying to Joseph. And sometimes when he’d pause for Joseph’s reply I’d catch myself waiting for the imaginary me to make one. So I took to staying in the same cabin as Jeff as much as I could.

  That seemed to make him uncomfortable after a while, though he pretended to glory in it. He’d ask me questions like, “Tell me about life, Joe. So I’ll know how to handle myself if we’re ever parted.”

  But the weariest things come to an end, even duty orbits around Shaula. And so the time came when we were servicing our last beacon—outside the planet Shaula-by, it was. Next step would be a fast interplanetary orbit for Base at Shaula-near.

  I was out working—on a safety line of course, but suit-jetting around more than I needed to, just for the pure joy of it, so that my suit tank was almost dry. I’d switched my suit radio off for a bit, because, working in space, Jeff had taken to just gabbling to me nervously all the time—maybe because he figured there couldn’t be room for Joseph with him in his suit.

***

...just scrambling eggs for a buddy...

  I finished up and paused for a last look at the ship. She was sweetly slim from her conical living quarters to the taper-tail of her ionic jet, but she had more junk on her than an amateur asteroid prospector hangs on his suit the first time out. Every duty orbit, fifty scientists come with permission from the Commandant to hang some automatic research gadget on the hull. The craziest one this time was a huge flattened band of gold-plated aluminum, little more than foil-thick, attached crosswise just in front of the tail and sticking out twenty feet on each side. I don’t know what it was there for—maybe to measure the effects of space on a Moebius strip—but it looked like a wedding ring that had been stepped on. So Jeff and I called it Trompled Love.

  But in spite of the junk, the ship looked mighty sweet against the saffron steppes and baby-blue seas of Shaula-by with Shaula herself, old Lambda Scorpii, flaming warm and wildly beyond, and with “United States” standing out big as life on the ship’s living quarters. United States of Shaula, of course.

***

I was almost dreaming out there, thinking how it hadn’t been such a terrible duty after all, when I saw the ship begin to slide past Shaula.

  Poking out of her tail, ghostlier than the flame over a cafe royale, was the evil blue glow of her jet. In an instant I’d guessed exactly what had happened and was beating myself on the head for not having anticipated it. Joseph had swum into the cabin right after Jeff. And Jeff had yelled at him. “It’s about time, you lazy lunkhead! Everything secure? Okay, I’m switching on the beam!” And I’d probably brought the whole thing about by telling him that damfool sled story—and then sticking to him so close he just had to get rid of me, so as to be with Joseph.

  Meanwhile the ship was gathering speed in her sneaky way and the wavy safety line between me and the airlock was starting to straighten.

  As you know, an ionic jet’s only good space-to-space. It’s not for heavy-G work; ours could deliver only one-half G at max and was doing less than one-quarter now. Which meant the ship was starting off slower than most ground cars.

  But the beam would fire for hours, building up to a terminal velocity of fifteen miles a second and carrying the ship far, far away from lonely Joe Hansen.

  Except that we were tied together, of course.

  I was very grateful then for the weeks I’d practiced space-roping, though I’d never won any prizes with it, because without thinking I started to whip my line very carefully. And on the third try, just as it was getting pretty straight, I managed to settle it in a notch in one outside end of Trompled Love. After that I took up strain on the line as gradually as I could, letting it friction through my gloves for as long as I could before putting all my mass on it—because although one-quarter G isn’t much, it piles up in a few seconds to quite a jerk. I spread that jerk into several little ones.

  Well, the last jerk came and the line didn’t part and Trompled Love didn’t crumple much, though the Shaula-light showed me several very nasty-looking wrinkles in it. And there I was trailing along after the ship, though out to one side, and feeling about as much strain on the line as if I were hanging from a cliff on the moon, and knowing I was going about five feet a second faster every second.

My idea wanting to be out to the side (and bless my impulses for realizing it was the one important thing!) was to keep my line and myself out of the beam. An ionic jet doesn’t look hot from the side. But from straight on it’s a lot brighter than an arc light—it’s almost as tight as a laser beam—and I didn’t want to think about what it would do to me, even trailing as I was a hundred yards aft.

  Though of course long before it had ruined me, it would have disintegrated my line.

  My being out to the side was putting the ship off balance on its jet and presumably throwing its course toward base and Shaula-near little by little into error. But that was the least of my worries, believe me.

  I thought for a bit and remembered I could talk to Jeff over my suit radio. I decided to try it, not without misgivings.

  I tongued it on and said, “Jeff. Oh, Jeff. I’m out here. You forgot me.”

  I was going to say some more, but just then he broke in, angry and so loud it made my helmet ring, with, “Joseph! Did you hear anything then?” A pause, then, “Well, clean the wax out of your ears, stupid, because I did! I think we got an enemy out there!”

  Another and longer pause, while my blood curdled a bit thicker, then, “Well, okay, Joseph, I’ll go along with you this time. But if I hear the enemy once more, I’m going to suit up and take a rifle and sit in the airlock door until I’ve potted him.”

  I tongued the radio off quick, fearful I’d sneeze or something. I had only one faint consolation: Joseph seemed to be a bit on my side, or maybe he was just lazy.

The good ship Lollipop.

  I thought some more, a mite frantic-like now, and after a while I said to myself, Been going five minutes now, so I’m doing about a quarter of a mile a second—that’s fifteen miles a minute, wow!—but out here velocities are purely relative. My suit does a little better than a quarter G full on. Okay. I’ll jet to the ship.

  No sooner said than acted on—I was beginning to rely too much on impulse now. The suit jet killed my false weight at once and I was off, mighty careful to aim myself along my line or a little outside it, so as not to wander over into the beam.

  Pretty soon the tail and Trompled Love were getting noticeably bigger.

  Then a lot bigger.

  Then my suit fuel ran out.

   I’d built up enough velocity so that I was still gaining on the ship for a few seconds. In fact, I almost made it. My gauntlet was about to close on Trompled Love when the ship started slowly to pull away. Oh, it was frustrating!

  I remembered then what I should have a lot earlier, and grabbed for the ship-end of my line so as not to lose the distance I’d gained—and in my haste I knocked it away from me. The only good thing was that I didn’t knock it out of the notch.

  Now I was losing space to the ship faster and faster. Yet all I could do was reel in the me-end of the line as fast as I could. Suddenly the whole line straightened and gave me a bigger jerk than I’d intended. I could see Trompled Love crumple a little. And I was swinging just a bit, like a pendulum.

  I used a glove-friction to spread the rest of the jerk, but still I was at the end of my line and Trompled Love had crumpled a bit more before I was coasting along with the ship again.

  My side of Trompled Love was bent back maybe twenty degrees. The eye of the beam shone at me from the tail like a pale blue moon. For quite a while it brightened and dimmed as I tick-tock swung.

  Meanwhile I was beating my skull for not having thought earlier of the obvious slow-but-safe way of doing it, instead of that lunatic suit-jetting. I once heard a psychologist say we’re mental slaves to power-machinery and I guess he had something.

  Clearly all I had to do was climb hand-over-hand up the line to the ship. At moon gravity that would be easy. If I should get tired I only had to clamp on and rest.

  So I waited for my emotions to settle a bit, and then I reached along the line and gave a smooth, medium-strength heave.

  Maybe there is something to ESP—at least in a devilish sort of way—because I picked the exact moment when Jeff decided to feed the beam more juice.

  There was a big jerk and I saw Trompled Love crumple a lot, so that it was pointing more than forty-five degrees aft.

  Now there was a steady pull on the line like I was hanging from a cliff on Mars. And the eye of the beam was a blue moon not so pale—in fact more like a sizzling blue sun seen through a light fog.

  After that I just didn’t have the heart to try the climb again. Once I started to draw myself up, very cautious, but on the first handhold I seemed to feel along the line Trompled Love crumpling some more and I quit for good.

  I figured that at this boost Jeff would be up to proper speed for Shaula-near in less than two hours. Well, I had suit-oxy and refrigeration for longer than that.

  Of course if Jeff decided not to cut the beam on schedule, maybe with the idea of eloping with Joseph to the next solar system—well, I’d discover then whether suit-oxy running out would stimulate me to try the climb again alongside the beam.

  (Or I could wait until he got her up near the speed of light, when by the General Theory of Relativity the line ought to be shortened enough so that I could hop aboard if I were sudden enough about it.... No, Joe Hansen, you quit that, I told myself, you don’t want to die with the gears in your head all stripped.)

  Thinking about the beam got me wondering exactly how close I was to it. I unshipped my suit-antenna and pulled it out to full length—about eight feet—and fished around with it in the direction of the beam.

  Nothing seemed to happen to it. It didn’t glow or anything; but I suddenly got a little electric shock, and when I drew it back I could see three inches of the tip were gone and the next couple inches were pitted. So much for curiosity.

  Next I reattached the antenna to my suit—which turned out to be a lot more troublesome job than unshipping it—and tongued on the radio with the idea of listening in on Jeff.

***

Right away I heard him say, “Wake up, Joseph! I’m going to tell you your faults again. I got a new way of cataloguing them—chronologically. Begin with childhood. You hitched sled-rides on airplanes. That was bad, Joseph, that was against the law. If the man had caught you doing it, if he’d seen you whizzing along there back of him, he’d have had every right to shoot you down in cold blood. Life is hard, Joseph, life is merciless....”

  Right then I felt a tickle in my throat.

  I tried quick to shut off the radio, but it is remarkably difficult to tongue anything when you have a cough coming. It came out finally in a series of squeaky glubs.

  “Snap to, Joseph, and listen hard,” I heard Jeff say. “It’s started again. Animal noises this time. You know if they make spacesuits for black panthers, Joseph?”

  I tongued off the radio quick, before the follow-up cough came.

  I didn’t have anything left to do now but think. So I thought about Jeff—how there seemed to be one Jeff who hated my guts and another Jeff who idolized me and another Jeff sneaking around in a jungle of sabertooth tigers and ... heck, there was probably a good twenty Jeffs sitting around inside his skull, some in light, some in darkness, but all of them watching each other and arguing together all the time. It was an odd way to think of a personality—a sort of perpetual Kaffeeklatsch—but it had its points. Maybe some of the little guys weren’t Jeffs at all, but his father and mother and a caveman ancestor or two and maybe some great-great-grandchild butting in now and then from the future....

  Well, I saw that speculation was getting out of hand so, taking a tip from Jeff, I began to count my own sins.

  It took quite a while. Some of them were pretty interesting reading, almost enough to take my mind off my predicament, but I tired of it finally.

  Then I began to count the stars.

  It was really the longest two hours plus I ever spent, except maybe the time my first big girl disappeared. But I don’t know. The experiences are hard to compare.

  I was about halfway through the stars when I went weightless. For an awful instant I thought the line had parted at last, but then I looked toward the ship and saw the bright little moon was gone.

***

Right away I gave a couple of tugs on the line and began to close slowly with the tail. No trouble at all—actually my only difficulty was resisting the temptation to build up more momentum, which would have resulted in a crash landing.

  I softed-in on Trompled Love okay, except there was a big spark. The beam must have charged me good. Then I worked my way to the true hull. After that there were handholds.

  Finally I got to a porthole in the living quarters, and I looked in, and there was Jeff jawing away at my empty seat. I put my helmet against the hull and very faintly I heard him say, “Joseph, I’m still worried about the enemy. I keep thinking I hear him or it. I’m going to make us some coffee, so we’ll stay real alert. You break out the guns.”

  I don’t suppose anyone ever moved quite so quietly and so quickly in a spacesuit as I did then. I got in the airlock, I got her up to pressure, I got unsuited—and all in less than five minutes, I’m sure. Maybe less than four.

Fritz Leiber.

  I swam to the cabin. It was empty. I slid into my seat just as Jeff floated in with the coffee.

  He went real pale when he spotted me. I saw there might be some trouble this time with the Joseph-Joe transition. But I knew the only way to play it was real cool. I nested there in my seat as if I hadn’t a worry or urge in the world—though my nerves and throat were just screaming for a squirt of that coffee.

  “Joe!” he squeaked at last. “Migod, you gave me an awful scare. I thought you’d done a bunk, I thought, you’d spaced yourself, I kept picturing you outside the ship.”

  “Why no, Jeff,” I answered quietly. “One way or another, I’ve been in this seat ever since take-off.”

  His brow wrinkled as he thought about that.

  I looked at the board and noticed that our terminal trip-velocity read fifteen miles a second. My, my.

  Finally Jeff said, “That’s right, you have.” And then, just a shade unhappily, “I might have known. You always tell the truth, Joe—you’re perfect.”

END

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Six Frightened Men. Robert Silverberg.

A free wallpaper off of the internet.

Robert Silverberg

 

SIX FRIGHTENED MEN

 

 

It was an unexplored planet and anything could happen—yet none of us expected to face a creature impossible to fight, let alone kill....

 

Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy June 1957

 

 

You put your life on the line when you join the Exploratory Wing of the Space Corps. They tell you that when you sign up. The way they told it to me, it went like this:

"You'll be out there on alien worlds where no human being has ever set foot—worlds which may or may not have been inhabited by hostile alien creatures. You take your life in your hands every time you make a planetfall out there. Still interested?"

"That's old stuff," I said. "You don't think I'd join up if it was an old ladies' tea party, do you?"

Which was how I happened to be crouching behind a fantastically-sculptured spiralling rock out on the yellow wind-blasted desert of Pollux V, huddling there with the fierce sweep of sand against my faceplate, looking at the monster that barred my path.

The thing was at least sixty feet tall and all eyes and mouth. The mouth yawned, showing yellow daggers a foot long. As for the eyes—well, they burned with the cold luminosity of an intelligent and inimical being.

I didn't know what the thing was. One minute I'd been examining an interesting rock formation, a second later I was hiding behind it, watching the ravening thing that had appeared out of nowhere.

Other members of the expedition were sprawled here and there on the desert too. I could see Max Feld, our paleontologist, curled in a tight plump little ball under an outcropping of weathered limestone, and there was Roy Laurence, the biochemist, flat on his stomach peering at the thing incredulously.

Back behind me were three others—Don Forster, Leo Mickens, Clyde Hamner. That made six. 

The two remaining members of the team, Medic Howard Graves and Anthropologist Lyman Donaldson, were back at the ship. We always left a shift of two back there in case of trouble.

And trouble had sure struck now!

I saw Laurence swivel in the sand and stare goggle-eyed at me. His lips moved, and over my helmet radio came: "What the hell is it, Phil? Where'd it come from?"

I'm a morphologist; I'm supposed to know things like that. But I could only shrug and say, "A thing like that could only come from the pits of Hell. I've never seen anything like it before."

 

I hadn't. We had been fine-combing the broad windswept plain in front of the ship, looking for archaeological remains. The planet was uninhabited, or so we thought after running a quick check—but Max Feld had discovered relics of a dead race, an exciting find, and we had all fanned out to help him in his search for more.

We had been heading toward a flat mountain wall that rose abruptly from the desert about a mile from the ship when—from nowhere—the creature appeared, towering above the desert like a dinosaur dropped from the skies.

But no dinosaur ever looked like this one. Sixty feet high, its skin a loathsome gray-green quivering jelly with thick hairy cilia projecting, its vat-like mouth gaping toothily, its cold, hard eyes flicking back and forth, searching for us as we flattened ourselves out of sight, it was an utterly ghastly being. Evolution had gone wild on this planet.

And we were cut off from the ship, hemmed between the mountain wall and the creature.

"What are we going to do?" Clyde Hamner whispered. "He's going to smell us out pretty soon."

As he spoke, the monster began to move—flowing, it seemed, like some vast protozoan.

"I'm going to blast it," I said, as it oozed closer to us. Cautiously, I lifted my Webley from its shoulder-holster, turned the beam to Full, began to squeeze the firing-stud.

A bright white-hot beam of force leaped from the nozzle and speared the creature's eye. It howled, seemed to leap in the air, thrashed around—

And changed.

A blaster, ladies and gentlemen. Usually good for amorphous blobs.

It became a boiling mass of amorphous protoplasm, writhing and billowing on the sand. I fired again into the mass—again and again, and the alien creature continued to shift its form. I was cold with horror, but I kept up the firing. My bolts seemed to be absorbed into the fluid mass without effect, but at least I had halted the oozing advance.

It reached one final hideous stage: a giant mouth, opening before us like the gate of hell. A mouth, nothing more. It yawned in front of us—

Then advanced.

I felt noxious vapors shoot out, bathing my thermosuit, and I saw a gargling larynx feet across. 

I fired, again and again, into the monster's throat.

My companions were firing too. We seemed to have halted the thing's advance. It paused some twenty feet from us, a wall of mouth.

Then it disappeared.

It blinked out of sight the way it had come—instantaneously. For a moment I didn't realize what had happened, and fired three useless charges into the space where the monster had been.

"It's gone," Hamner exclaimed.

My hands were trembling—me, who had stood up to Venusian mudworms without a whimper, who had fought the giant fleas of Rigel IX. I was shaking all over. Sweat was running down my entire body, and the wiper of my faceplate was going crazy trying to blot my forehead.

Then I heard dull groans coming from up ahead. One final grunt, then silence. They had been coming from Max Feld.

Looking around cautiously, I rose to my feet. There was no sign of the creature. I ran to where Max lay.

The plump paleontologist was sprawled flat in the sand, face down. I bent, yanked him over, peered in his facemask. His eyes were open, staring—and lifeless.

 

It wasn't till we got back to the ship that we could open his spacesuit and confirm what I thought I saw on his face.

Doc Graves pronounced it finally: "He's dead. Heart attack. What the devil did you see out there, anyway?"

Quickly I described it. When I was finished the medic shivered. "Lord! No wonder Max had an attack. What a nightmare!"

Donaldson, the anthropologist, appeared from somewhere in the back of the ship. Seeing Max's body, he said, "What happened?"

"We were attacked on the desert. Max was the only casualty. The thing didn't touch us—it just 

tood there and changed shape. Max must have died of fright."

Donaldson scowled. He was a wry, taciturn individual with a coldness about him that I didn't like. I could pretty much guess what he would say. No expression of grief, or anything like that.

"It's going to look bad for you, Doc, when it's discovered we had a man with a weak heart in the crew."

The medic stiffened. "I checked Max's heart before we left. It was as good as anyone's. But the shock of seeing that thing—"

"Yeah," Don Forster said angrily. "You'd have been shivering in your boots too if that thing had popped out of nowhere right over your left shoulder."

"Keep your remarks to yourself, Forster. I signed on for the Exploratory Team with the same understanding any of you did—that we were going into alien, uncharted worlds and could expect to meet up with anything. Anything at all. Fright's a mere emotional reaction. Adults—as you supposedly are—should be able to control it."

I felt like hitting him, but I restrained myself. That ordeal out on the desert had left me drained, nerves raw and shaken. I shrugged and looked away.

"Well?" Hamner said. "What do we do? Go home?"

It was said half as a joke, but I saw from the look on young Leo Mickens' face that he was perfectly willing to take the suggestion seriously and get off Pollux V as fast as he could.

To forestall any trouble, I said, "It's a tempting idea. But I don't think it would look good on our records."

"You're right," Hamner agreed. "We stay. We stay until we know what that thing is, where it came from, and how we can lick it."

We stayed. We spent the rest of that day aboard ship, having called off the day's explorations in memory of Max. The bright orb of Pollux set about 2000 ship time, and the sky was filled with a glorious sight: a horde of moons whirling above. The moons of Pollux V were incredible.

There were one hundred of them, ranging in size from a hunk of rock the size of Mars' Deimos to one massive high-albedo satellite almost a thousand miles in diameter. They marched across the sky in stately order, filling the Polluxian night with brightness.

Only we didn't feel much sense of wonder. We buried Max in a crude grave, laid him to rest under the light of a hundred moons, and then withdrew to the ship to consider our problem.

"Where'd it come from?" Doc Graves asked.

"Nowhere," I said. "Just nowhere. One second it wasn't there, next second it was. It vanished the same way."

"How could that be?" Donaldson asked. "Matter doesn't work that way; it's flatly impossible."

Holding myself in check, I said, "Maybe so, Donaldson. But the thing was there."

"How do you know?" the anthropologist persisted, sneering a little. "You sure it wasn't a mass illusion of some kind?"

"Damn you," Forster shouted, "You weren't there. We were—and we saw it. Max saw it. Ask Max if it was there!"

Evenly, Donaldson said, "On the basis of your description, I'm convinced it must have been an illusion. I'm willing to go out there and have a look first thing in the morning—either alone or with any of you, if you can work up the courage. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough," I said. "I'll go with you."

 

The next morning we left the ship, clad in thermosuits, armed to the teeth—at least I was. I carried a subforce gun and a neural disruptor; Donaldson scornfully packed only the prescribed blaster.

We crossed the flat plain together, without speaking. I led the way, looking back nervously every few paces, but there was nothing behind me but Donaldson. We made a complete reconnaissance of the area, picked up a few interesting outlying fossils—Donaldson thought they might be relics of the dead race of Pollux V—and reached the bare face of the mountain without any difficulties.

"Well?" Donaldson asked sneeringly. "Where's your monster this time? He afraid of me?"

"So it didn't show up," I snapped. "That doesn't prove anything. For all we know it might jump us on the way back to the ship."

"So it might. But I doubt it. For one thing, I've been checking footprints in the sand. I've counted six tracks—one each for you, Feld, Hamner, Laurence, Forster, and Mickens. Unfortunately, that doesn't leave any for your monster. There's no sign of him anywhere."

I was a little startled by that. I glanced around. "You're right," I admitted, frowning. Licking dry lips, I said, "There ought to be some trace—unless the wind's covered it."

"The wind hasn't fully covered the traces of you six yet," Donaldson pointed out with obstinate logic. "Why should it obliterate only those of your nemesis?"

I scowled, but said nothing. Donaldson was right again—but I still found it hard to convince myself that what we had seen was only an illusion.

On the way back to the ship, I formulated all sorts of theories to explain the creature. It was a monster out of subspace, generated by etheric force; it was a radiation-creature without tangible physical body; it was—

I had half a dozen conjectures, each as unlikely as the next. But we returned to the ship safely, without any trouble whatever. I was sure of one thing: the creature was real, no matter what hell-void had spawned it.

When we returned, I saw the tense faces of the men in the ship ease.

"All right," Donaldson said. "We've both been out there and come back. I say we ought to investigate this place fully. There's been a high-level civilization here at one time, and—"

"Suppose it's this monster that killed off that civilization?" Forster suggested.

"Then it's our duty to investigate it," I had to say. "Even at the cost of our lives." Here I agreed with Donaldson; monster or no, it was our job to fathom the secrets of this dead world.

We agreed to explore in twos, rather than risk the customary complement of six all at once. 

Two men would go out; five remain within, three of them space-suited and ready to leave the ship to answer any emergency call.

Mickens and Forster drew the first assignment. They suited up and left. Tensely, we proceeded about our shipside duties, cataloguing information from our previous stops, performing routine tasks, busying ourselves desperately in unimportant work to take our minds off the men who were out on that desert together.

An hour later, Forster returned. Alone.

His face was pale, his eyes bulging, and almost before he stepped from the airlock we knew what must have happened.

"Where's Mickens?" I asked, breaking the terrible hush in the cabin.

"Dead," he said hollowly. "We—we got to the mountain, and—God, it was awful!"

He sank down in an acceleration cradle and started to sob. Doc Graves fumbled at his belt, drew out a neurotab, forced it between the boy's quivering lips. He calmed; color returned to his face.

"Tell us about it," Hamner urged gently.

"We reached the back end of the plain, and Leo suggested we try the mountain. He thought he saw a sort of cave somewhere back in there, and wanted to have a look. We had to go over that sharp rock shelf to get in there.

"So we started to scale the cliff. We were about a hundred feet up, and going along a path maybe four feet wide, when—when—" He shuddered, then forced himself to go on. "The monster appeared. It popped out of nowhere right in front of Leo. He was taken by surprise and toppled over the edge. I managed to hang on."

"Were you attacked?" I asked.

"No. It vanished, right after Leo fell off. I went down to look at him. His facemask had broken. I left him there."

I glanced around at the tight-jawed, hard faces of my crewmates. No one said a word—but we all knew the job that faced us now. We couldn't leave Pollux V until we'd discovered the nature of the beast that menaced us—even if it cost us our lives. We couldn't go back to Earth and send some other guys in to do the job. That wasn't the way the Exploratory Wing operated. We had a tradition to uphold.

We drew lots, and Hamner and Donaldson went out there to recover Mickens' body. They encountered no hazards, and brought young Mickens' shattered body back. We buried it next to Max's. The monster had taken a toll of two already, without actually touching either.

It was almost like some evil plan unfolding to wipe us out one by one. I didn't like it—but I didn't have anything too concrete to base it on, not till the fifth day.

I was teamed with Donaldson again, and I felt strangely confident about our safety. So far the monster had yet to materialize any time Donaldson was out on the plain. That fact had been in the back of my mind for quite a while. It was the only clue I had.

We prowled over the plain, which by now had been pretty well finetoothed, and then I suggested we try the cave where Mickens had met his fate.

"I don't like the idea," Donaldson said, eyeing the narrow shelf of rock we would have to walk across. "You remember what happened to Mickens, and—"

Don't mind me, I'm just a big fucking bug...

I laughed harshly. "Don't tell me you're beginning to believe in this monster of ours?"

"Of course not. Mickens simply had an attack of vertigo and toppled off; Forster's active imagination supplied the monster. But that shelf looks treacherous. I'd just as soon not go up there."

"You're not talking like an Exploratory Wing man, Donaldson. But it's okay with me if you want to wait down here. That cave might be a goldmine of artifacts. We ought at least to have a look."

His hard face dropped within his mask. "No—I couldn't let you go alone. You win," he said. "Let's try the cave."

We began the climb—and it was, I saw, a deadly road. It narrowed dizzyingly—and while the drop was only a hundred feet, which a man could survive if he landed right, spacesuits weren't made to take falls of that sort. And without a suit, a man was instantly dead on this methane-ammonia atmosphere world.

We were about ten feet out on the ledge, I in the lead and Donaldson behind me, when I heard him gasp.

"Great God! There it is!"

I felt him lurch against me in sudden terror, nearly heaving me into the abyss, but somehow I steadied myself, dropped to my knees, hung on. I turned.

He had avoided a fall too. But I saw no monster.

"Where is it?" I asked.

"It came out of the air right next to me—just popped out of the void and vanished again. I saw it, though." His voice was hoarse. "I apologize for everything I've said. The thing is real. If it weren't for your sure footing we'd both have gone the way Mickens did."

He seemed almost hysterical. There was no sign of the monster, but I wasn't going to take any chances out on this ribbon of rock with a hysterical man.

"Let's go back," I said. "We'll try to get to the cave some other time."

"All right," Donaldson said, shaken. We turned and inched our way back along the shelf to safety, and half-ran to the sanctuary of the ship.

But once we were inside and I was thinking clearly again, I began to sprout some suspicions.

 

I reasoned it out very carefully. Every time Donaldson had gone out previously, the monster had failed to show. There wasn't another man aboard ship who hadn't had some encounter with the thing. And some of them were remarking about Donaldson's apparent luck.

So this time we're out on the shelf, and the monster does show up—but Donaldson's the only one who sees him, after staunchly denying its existence all along. It seemed to me that it might only have been pretense, that he had faked seeing the monster for some reason of his own.

I didn't know what that could be. But I had some ideas. Donaldson, after all, had been a member of the first party to explore Pollux V, the day before the exploration that killed Max. I had remained on the ship while that group had been out.

Suppose, I thought, Donaldson had found something on that first trip, something that he hadn't bothered to tell the rest of us about. Something he might want badly enough to kill all of us for.

It was pretty far-fetched, but it was worth a try. I decided to explore Donaldson's cabin.

Ordinarily we respected privacy to an extreme degree aboard the ship. I had never been in Donaldson's cabin before—he never invited anyone in, and naturally I never went uninvited. 

But this was a special case, I felt.

The door was locked, but it's not hard to coerce a magneplate into opening if you know how they work. Donaldson was in the ship's lab and I hoped he'd stay out of my way till I had a good look around.

The room was just like any of ours, filled with the usual things—a shelf of reference books, a file of musictapes, some minifilms, other things to help to pass away the long hours between planets. It seemed neat, precise, uncluttered, just as Donaldson himself was crisp and reserved.

I moved around the room very carefully, looking for anything out of the ordinary. And then I found it.

It was a black box, nothing more, about four inches square. It was sitting on one of his shelves. 

Just a bare black box, a little cube of metal—but what metal!

Beyond the blackness was a strange unearthly shimmer, an eye-teasing pattern of shifting molecules within the metal itself. The box had a sleek, alien appearance. I knew it hadn't been in the cabin when we left Earth.

With a sudden rush of excitement I realized my mad guess had been right. 

Donaldson had found something and kept news of it back from the rest of us. And perhaps it was linked to the deaths of Max Feld and Leo Mickens.

Cautiously I reached out to examine the box. I lifted it. It was oddly heavy, and strange to the touch.

But no sooner did I have it in my hands when the door opened behind me. Donaldson had come back.

 

"What are you doing with that?" he shouted.

"I—"

He crossed the cabin at top speed and seized the box from my hands. And suddenly the monster appeared.

It materialized right in the cabin, between Donaldson and me, its vast bulk pressing against the walls. I felt its noisome breath on me, sensed its evil reek.

"Donaldson!"

But Donaldson was no longer there. I was alone in the cabin with the creature.

I backed away into the far corner, my mouth working in terror. I tried to call for help, but couldn't get a word out. And the beast squirmed and changed like a vast amoeba, writhing and twisting from one grey oily shape to another.

I sank to the floor, numb with horror—and then realized that the monster wasn't approaching.

It was just staying there, making faces at me.

Making faces. Like a bogeyman.

It was trying to scare me to death. That was how Max Feld had died, that was how Leo Mickens had died.

But I wasn't going to die that way.

I rose and confronted the thing. It just remained in the middle of the cabin, blotting everything out behind it, stretching from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, changing from one hell-shape to another and hoping I'd curl up and die.

I stepped forward.

Cautiously I touched the monster's writhing surface. It was like touching a cloud. I sank right in.

The monster changed, took the dragon form again—much smaller, of course, to fit the cabin. 

Teeth gnashed the air before my nose—but didn't bite into my throat as they promised to do. 

Nervelessly I stood my ground.

Then I waded into the heart of the monster, right into its middle with the grey oiliness billowing out all around me. There seemed to be nothing material, nothing to grapple hold of. It was like fighting a dream.

But then I hit something solid. My groping hands closed around warm flesh. I started to squeeze.

I had a throat. A living core of flesh within the monster? It might be. I constricted my fingers, dug them in, heard strangled gasps coming from further in. I couldn't see, but I hung on.

Then a human voice said, "Damn you—you're choking me!" And the monster thinned.

Through the diminishing smoke of the dream-creature, I saw Donaldson, and I was clutching his throat. He still held the black box in his hand, but it was slipping from his grasp, slipping....

He dropped it. It clattered to the floor and I kicked it far across the cabin.

The monster vanished completely.

 

It was just the two of us, there in the cabin. I heard fists pounding on the door from outside, but 

I ignored them. This was between me and Donaldson.

"What is that thing?" I asked, facing him, tugging at his throat. I shook him. "Where'd you find that hell-thing?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" he wheezed.

My fingers tightened. Suddenly he drew up his foot and lashed out at my stomach. I let go of his throat and fell back, the wind knocked out of me. As I staggered backward, he darted for the fallen box, but I recovered and brought my foot down hard on his outstretched hand.

He snarled in pain. I felt his other fist crash into my stomach again. I was almost numb, sick, ready to curl up in a knot and close my eyes. But I forced myself to suck in breath and hit him.

His head snapped back. I hit him again, and he reeled soggily. His neat, precise lips swelled into a bloody mass. His fists moved hazily; I blackened one of his eyes, and he groaned and slumped. Fury was in my fists; I was avenging the honor of the Exploratory Wing against the one man who had broken its oaths.

"Enough ... enough...."

But I hit him again and again, till he sagged to the floor. I picked up the black metal box, fondled it in my hands. Then, tentatively, I threw a thought at it.

Monster.

The monster appeared in all its ugliness.

Vanish.

It vanished.

"That's how it works, isn't it?" I said. "It's a thought projector. That monster never existed outside your own mind, Donaldson."

"Don't hit me again," he whined. I didn't. He was beneath contempt.

I threw open the door and saw the other crewmen huddled outside, their faces pale. "It's all over," I said. "Here's your monster."

I held out the black box.

 

We held court on Donaldson that night, and he made full confession. That first day, he had stumbled over an alien treasure in the cave beyond the hill—that, and the thought-converter. 

The idea came to him that perhaps, as sole survivor of the expedition, he could turn some of the treasure to his own uses.

Robert Silverberg, (centre), in this vintage photo.

So he utilized the thought-converter in a campaign to pick us off one by one without aiming suspicion at himself. Only his clumsy way of pretending to see the creature himself had given him away; else he might have killed us all.

Our rulebook gave no guide on what to do about him—but we reached a decision easily enough.

When we left Pollux V, taking with us samples of the treasure, and other specimens of the long-dead race (including the thought-converter) we left Donaldson behind, on the bare, lifeless planet, with about a week's supply of food and air.

No one ever learned of his treachery. We listed him as a casualty, along with Max and Leo, when we returned to Earth. The Exploratory Wing had too noble a name to tarnish by revealing what Donaldson had done ... and none of us will ever speak the truth. The Wing means too much to us for that.

And I think they're going to award him a posthumous medal....

 

END

 

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