Before Stage Two began, or before Herrell McCray realized it had begun,
he had an inspiration.
The dark was absolute, but he remembered where the spacesuit had been
and groped his way to it and, yes, it had what all spacesuits had to
have. It had a light. He found the toggle that turned it on and pressed
it.
Light. White, flaring, Earthly light, that showed everything--even
himself.
"God bless," he said, almost beside himself with joy. Whatever that
pinkish, dancing halo had been, it had thrown him into a panic; now
that he could see his own hand again, he could blame the weird effects
on some strange property of the light.
At the moment he heard the click that was the beginning of Stage Two.
He switched off the light and stood for a moment, listening.
For a second he thought he heard the far-off voice, quiet, calm and
almost hopeless, that he had sensed hours before; but then that was
gone. Something else was gone. Some faint mechanical sound that had
hardly registered at the time, but was not missing. And there was,
perhaps, a nice new sound that had not been there before; a very
faint, an almost inaudible elfin hiss.
McCray switched the light on and looked around. There seemed to be no
change.
And yet, surely, it was warmer in here.
He could see no difference; but perhaps, he thought, he could smell
one. The unpleasant halogen odor from the grating was surely stronger
now. He stood there, perplexed.
A tinny little voice from the helmet of the space suit said sharply,
amazement in its tone, "McCray, is that you? Where the devil are you
calling from?"
He forgot smell, sound and temperature and leaped for the suit. "This
is Herrell McCray," he cried. "I'm in a room of some sort, apparently
on a planet of approximate Earth mass. I don't know--"
"McCray!" cried the tiny voice in his ear. "Where are you? This is
_Jodrell Bank_ calling. Answer, please!"
"I _am_ answering, damn it," he roared. "What took you so long?"
"Herrell McCray," droned the tiny voice in his ear, "Herrell McCray,
Herrell McCray, this is _Jodrell Bank_ responding to your message,
acknowledge please. Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray...."
It kept on, and on.
McCray took a deep breath and thought. Something was wrong. Either they
didn't hear him, which meant the radio wasn't transmitting, or--no.
That was not it; they _had_ heard him, because they were responding.
But it seemed to take them so long....
Abruptly his face went white. Took them so long! He cast back in his
mind, questing for a fact, unable to face its implications. When was
it he called them? Two hours ago? Three?
Did that mean--did it _possibly_ mean--that there was a lag of an hour
or two each way? Did it, for example, mean that at the speed of his
suit's pararadio, millions of times faster than light, it took _hours_
to get a message to the ship and back?
And if so ... where in the name of heaven was he?
* * * * *
Herrell McCray was a navigator, which is to say, a man who has learned
to trust the evidence of mathematics and instrument readings beyond the
guesses of his "common sense." When _Jodrell Bank_, hurtling faster
than light in its voyage between stars, made its regular position
check, common sense was a liar. Light bore false witness. The line of
sight was trustworthy directly forward and directly after--sometimes
not even then--and it took computers, sensing their data through
instruments, to comprehend a star bearing and convert three fixes into
a position.
If the evidence of his radio contradicted common sense, common sense
was wrong. Perhaps it was impossible to believe what the radio's
message implied; but it was not necessary to "believe," only to act.
McCray thumbed down the transmitter button and gave a concise report
of his situation and his guesses. "I don't know how I got here. I
don't know how long I've been gone, since I was unconscious for a
time. However, if the transmission lag is a reliable indication--" he
swallowed and went on--"I'd estimate I am something more than five
hundred light-years away from you at this moment. That's all I have to
say, except for one more word: Help."
He grinned sourly and released the button. The message was on its way,
and it would be hours before he could have a reply. Therefore he had to
consider what to do next.
He mopped his brow. With the droning, repetitious call from the ship
finally quiet, the room was quiet again. And warm.
Very warm, he thought tardily; and more than that. The halogen stench
was strong in his nostrils again.
Hurriedly McCray scrambled into the suit. By the time he was sealed
down he was coughing from the bottom of his lungs, deep, tearing rasps
that pained him, uncontrollable. Chlorine or fluorine, one of them was
in the air he had been breathing. He could not guess where it had come
from; but it was ripping his lungs out.
He flushed the interior of the suit out with a reckless disregard for
the wastage of his air reserve, holding his breath as much as he could,
daring only shallow gasps that made him retch and gag. After a long
time he could breathe, though his eyes were spilling tears.
He could see the fumes in the room now. The heat was building up.
Automatically--now that he had put it on and so started its
servo-circuits operating--the suit was cooling him. This was a
deep-space suit, regulation garb when going outside the pressure hull
of an FTL ship. It was good up to at least five hundred degrees in thin
air, perhaps three or four hundred in dense. In thin air or in space it
was the elastic joints and couplings that depolymerized when the heat
grew too great; in dense air, with conduction pouring energy in faster
than the cooling coils could suck it out and hurl it away, it was the
refrigerating equipment that broke down.
McCray had no way of knowing just how hot it was going to get. Nor,
for that matter, had the suit been designed to operate in a corrosive
medium.
All in all it was time for him to do something.
* * * * *
Among the debris on the floor, he remembered, was a five-foot space-ax,
tungsten-steel blade and springy aluminum shaft.
McCray caught it up and headed for the door. It felt good in his
gauntlets, a rewarding weight; any weapon straightens the back of the
man who holds it, and McCray was grateful for this one. With something
concrete to do he could postpone questioning. Never mind why he had
been brought here; never mind how. Never mind what he would, or could,
do next; all those questions could recede into the background of his
mind while he swung the ax and battered his way out of this poisoned
oven.
_Crash-clang!_ The double jolt ran up the shaft of the ax, through his
gauntlets and into his arm; but he was making progress, he could see
the plastic--or whatever it was--of the door. It was chipping out. Not
easily, very reluctantly; but flaking out in chips that left a white
powdery residue.
At this rate, he thought grimly, he would be an hour getting through
it. Did he have an hour?
But it did not take an hour. One blow was luckier than the rest; it
must have snapped the lock mechanism. The door shook and slid ajar.
McCray got the thin of the blade into the crack and pried it wide.
He was in another room, maybe a hall, large and bare.
McCray put the broad of his back against the broken door and pressed it
as nearly closed as he could; it might not keep the gas and heat out,
but it would retard them.
The room was again unlighted--at least to McCray's eyes. There was not
even that pink pseudo-light that had baffled him; here was nothing
but the beam of his suit lamp. What it showed was cryptic. There were
evidences of use: shelves, boxy contraptions that might have been
cupboards, crude level surfaces attached to the walls that might have
been workbenches. Yet they were queerly contrived, for it was not
possible to guess from them much about the creatures who used them.
Some were near the floor, some at waist height, some even suspended
from the ceiling itself. A man would need a ladder to work at these
benches and McCray, staring, thought briefly of many-armed blind giants
or shapeless huge intelligent amoebae, and felt the skin prickle at the
back of his neck.
He tapped half-heartedly at one of the closed cupboards, and was not
surprised when it proved as refractory as the door. Undoubtedly he
could batter it open, but it was not likely that much would be left of
its contents when he was through; and there was the question of time.
But his attention was diverted by a gleam from one of the benches.
Metallic parts lay heaped in a pile. He poked at them with a
stiff-fingered gauntlet; they were oddly familiar. They were, he
thought, very much like the parts of a bullet-gun.
In fact, they were. He could recognize barrel, chamber, trigger, even
a couple of cartridges, neatly opened and the grains of powder stacked
beside them. It was an older, clumsier model than the kind he had seen
in survival locker, on the _Jodrell Bank_--and abruptly wished he were
carrying now--but it was a pistol. Another trophy, like the strange
assortment in the other room? He could not guess. But the others had
been more familiar; they all have come from his own ship. He was
prepared to swear that nothing like this antique had been aboard.
The drone began again in his ear, as it had at five-minute intervals
all along:
"Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is _Jodrell Bank_
calling Herrell McCray...."
And louder, blaring, then fading to normal volume as the AVC circuits
toned the signal down, another voice. A woman's voice, crying out in
panic and fear: "_Jodrell Bank!_ Where are you? Help!"