Out in the great gas cloud of the Orion
Nebula McCray found an ally--and a foe!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
His name was Herrell McCray and he was scared.
As best he could tell, he was in a sort of room no bigger than a prison
cell. Perhaps it was a prison cell. Whatever it was, he had no business
in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump
from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. McCray
was ship's navigator, plotting course corrections--not that there were
any, ever; but the reason there were none was that the check-sightings
were made every hour of the long flight. He had read off the azimuth
angles from the computer sights, automatically locked on their beacon
stars, and found them correct; then out of long habit confirmed the
locking mechanism visually. It was only a personal quaintness; he had
done it a thousand times. And while he was looking at Betelgeuse, Rigel
and Saiph ... it happened.
The room was totally dark, and it seemed to be furnished with a
collection of hard, sharp, sticky and knobby objects of various shapes
and a number of inconvenient sizes. McCray tripped over something
that rocked under his feet and fell against something that clattered
hollowly. He picked himself up, braced against something that smelled
dangerously of halogen compounds, and scratched his shoulder, right
through his space-tunic, against something that vibrated as he touched
it.
McCray had no idea where he was, and no way to find out.
Not only was he in darkness, but in utter silence as well. No. Not
quite utter silence.
Somewhere, just at the threshold of his senses, there was something
like a voice. He could not quite hear it, but it was there. He sat as
still as he could, listening; it remained elusive.
Probably it was only an illusion.
But the room itself was hard fact. McCray swore violently and out loud.
It was crazy and impossible. There simply was no way for him to get
from a warm, bright navigator's cubicle on _Starship Jodrell Bank_ to
this damned, dark, dismal hole of a place where everything was out to
hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. He cried aloud in
exasperation: "If I could only _see_!"
He tripped and fell against something that was soft, slimy and, like
baker's dough, not at all resilient.
A flickering halo of pinkish light appeared. He sat up, startled. He
was looking at something that resembled a suit of medieval armor.
* * * * *
It was, he saw in a moment, not armor but a spacesuit. But what was the
light? And what were these other things in the room?
Wherever he looked, the light danced along with his eyes. It was like
having tunnel vision or wearing blinders. He could see what he was
looking at, but he could see nothing else. And the things he could
see made no sense. A spacesuit, yes; he knew that he could construct
a logical explanation for that with no trouble--maybe a subspace
meteorite striking the _Jodrell Bank_, an explosion, himself knocked
out, brought here in a suit ... well, it was an explanation with more
holes than fabric, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational.
How to explain a set of Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire?_ A space-ax? Or the old-fashioned child's rocking-chair, the
chemistry set--or, most of all, the scrap of gaily printed fabric
that, when he picked it up, turned out to be a girl's scanty bathing
suit? It was slightly reassuring, McCray thought, to find that most of
the objects were more or less familiar. Even the child's chair--why,
he'd had one more or less like that himself, long before he was old
enough to go to school. But what were they doing here?
Not everything he saw was familiar. The walls of the room itself were
strange. They were not metal or plaster or knotty pine; they were
not papered, painted or overlaid with stucco. They seemed to be made
of some sort of hard organic compound, perhaps a sort of plastic or
processed cellulose. It was hard to tell colors in the pinkish light.
But they seemed to have none. They were "neutral"--the color of aged
driftwood or unbleached cloth.
Three of the walls were that way, and the floor and ceiling. The fourth
wall was something else. Areas in it had the appearance of gratings;
from them issued the pungent, distasteful halogen odor. They might be
ventilators, he thought; but if so the air they brought in was worse
than what he already had.
McCray was beginning to feel more confident. It was astonishing how a
little light made an impossible situation bearable, how quickly his
courage flowed back when he could see again.
He stood still, thinking. Item, a short time ago--subjectively it
seemed to be minutes--he had been aboard the _Jodrell Bank_ with
nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting
one of the female passengers for coffee. Item, apart from being
shaken up and--he admitted it--scared damn near witless, he did not
seem to be hurt. Item, wherever he was now, it became, not so much what
had happened to him, but what had happened to the ship?
He allowed that thought to seep into his mind. Suppose there had been
an accident to the _Jodrell Bank_.
He could, of course, be dead. All this could be the fantasies of a
cooling brain.
McCray grinned into the pink-lit darkness. The thought had somehow
refreshed him, like icewater between rounds, and with a clearing head
he remembered what a spacesuit was good for.
It held a radio.
He pressed the unsealing tabs, slipped his hand into the vacant chest
of the suit and pulled out the hand mike. "This is Herrell McCray," he
said, "calling the _Jodrell Bank_."
No response. He frowned. "This is Herrell McCray, calling _Jodrell
Bank_.
"Herrell McCray, calling anybody, come in, please."
But there was no answer.
Thoughtfully he replaced the microphone. This was ultrawave radio,
something more than a million times faster than light, with a range
measured, at least, in hundreds of light-years. If there was no answer,
he was a good long way from anywhere.
Of course, the thing might not be operating.