_What can a man do when he alone
must decide the fate of Earth and all
its people--and when the choices
offered him are slavery and death...._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Captain Allen Hawkins stood quietly in the observation room of the
_Sunward_ looking out at subspace. He was a medium-sized man with a
trim squareness to him that suggested he had been in the military most
of his life. He had a good deal of gold on his sleeve and a good deal
of silver in his hair, and he had discovered in his many years in the
Space Navy that the two usually went hand in hand. In the background he
could hear the noise and ordered confusion of the ship's bridge. But
at the moment he paid it little attention, concentrating instead on the
observation window.
It was not the first time that he had stood thus, gazing at whatever
lay beyond the shell of the ship. Almost every time he had put the
_Sunward_ through the dark shadow of subspace, he had deserted the
bridge for at least a few moments to come and stare out the window.
"God," he said out loud, repressing a shiver that wanted to crawl down
his spine.
"Perhaps 'God forsaken' would be a better description," came a voice
from behind him.
The voice belonged to Dr. J. L. Broussard, the _Sunward's_ senior
psychologist. And although the two men were on more than casually
friendly terms, Hawkins didn't turn to greet him. The fascination of
the observation port seemed to obviate the normal requirements of
courtesy. "At times like this I think you're right. 'God forsaken.'
That's just what it is," Hawkins said. "Completely black, completely
empty. You know, it frightens me every time we make the jump through
it."
A voice from the bridge called out, "Twelve minutes until zero. No
noticeable deviations, Captain."
"Very well," Hawkins said loudly enough to be heard on the bridge.
"Perhaps it frightens all of us just a little," said Broussard. He
leaned his oversized body against the observation room wall. His big,
mild face had a relaxed look to it. "I wonder why it affects us that
way," he added almost as if it were a casual afterthought, but his eyes
had a too-shrewd look to them.
"You're the psychologist. You tell me why," Hawkins said. He paused for
just a moment, expecting Broussard to reply. But after a few seconds
when the man gave him no conversational support, Hawkins continued.
"For my part, I guess it frightens me because--well, because a man
seems to get lost out there. In normal space there are always stars
around, no matter how distant they may be, and you feel that you've got
direction and location. In subspace, all you've got is nothing--and
one hell of a lot of that." He pushed his cap back until it perched
comfortably on the rear of his head. "It's incredible when you stop
to think about it. An area--an opening as big as the whole of our
universe, big enough to pack every galaxy we've ever seen in it and
still have lots of room left over. All that space--and not a single
atom of matter in it anywhere." Captain Hawkins shook his grayed head
in wonder. "At least," he went on. "Not a single atom in it until we
came barging in to use it as a short cut across our own universe."
The man on the bridge called out, "Ten minutes until zero. No
noticeable deviations, Captain."
"Very well," Hawkins answered.
Broussard shifted his considerable weight into a more comfortable
position. "You feel rather strongly about this, don't you?"
"That I do," said Hawkins. As much as he enjoyed an occasional
conversation with the psychologist, Broussard's questions often got on
his nerves.
"Don't you think it's better we discovered subspace than if we were
still back trying to beat the speed of light in our own universe?"
Broussard asked him.
"Oh, stop looking for a dangling neurosis somewhere, Broussard,"
Hawkins said, managing a smile. "You know quite well that I've got
absolutely nothing at all against the use of subspace for 'rapid
transportation,' so to speak. It's just that I'm the sort of man who
likes to know where he's going _all_ the time. And out here, in this
stuff, you lose your sense of direction. There's no up, no down, no in
between. It took spacemen a long time to get accustomed to the wild
freedom they found out in the middle of normal space. But at least
there you could always head for a star if you got lost. Out here ..."
He gestured futilely towards the blackness staring in at them from the
window. They stood silently contemplating it for several moments.
"Eight minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain," came the
voice from the bridge again.
"Very well," Captain Hawkins replied, breaking the brief silence
between the two men. Then he went on, "Broussard, have you ever been
out there in that stuff? Oh, I don't mean like now, in a ship or a
rescue craft. I mean in a spacesuit, all by yourself."
The psychologist shook his head. "No, I never have." He paused for just
a second, then added, "What's it really like?"
There were times, Hawkins thought, when even the phrasing of a simple
question on Broussard's part carried a slight sting. But like the
brief pain that accompanies the probing point of a hypodermic needle,
the tiny barbs contained in the man's questions were soon forgotten.
Hawkins smiled. "It's my own private guess of what hell will turn out
to be. 'God forsaken,' did we say? That's just about it. We stopped to
repair a ship once, and some of us had to go outside to work on it. I
guess I was out there for less than three hours--no more than that. And
yet I was almost a madman by the time they hauled me back inside. I
can't explain why." His voice trailed off into nothingness. "I guess it
was just the blackness that did it."
"Six minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain."
"Very well." For the first time Hawkins turned to face the
psychologist. "During my training at the Academy they locked me up in a
closet once, just as a joke. I was without light for hours, but it was
nothing like that out there. You should know, Broussard. Why does it
look so much blacker in that window now than any other black I've ever
seen?"
Broussard looked the man over carefully before answering, wondering
just exactly what sort of reply might be called for. "I think the
reason is that you've got close to optimum conditions for it here in
the observatory," he said momentarily. "You always get the blackest
shade of black inside a ring of white light. Look at the window."
Hawkins turned to do as directed. "There you've got a white frame
surrounding the complete absence of light. That's just about as good as
you can get. No wonder it looks so black to you."
Hawkins shook his head, not so much in disbelief as in wonder.
"As a matter of fact," the psychologist continued almost in a hurry.
"If you stayed out in subspace all by yourself, with no ship near you
and no light of your own, after a while it wouldn't seem black to you
at all. You'd get cortical adaptation, and things would just look gray.
And not too long after that, you'd stop 'seeing' entirely, as we think
of seeing. Or, as a friend of mine once said, under those conditions
you'd 'see' as much with your elbows as you would with your eyes.
Funny, isn't it? We usually think of black as being the absence of
light. And yet, in order to 'see' black, we've got to have at least a
little light around every once in a while."
The watchman on the bridge droned out the time again. "Four minutes
until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain."
Allen Hawkins gave a large sigh, then readjusted the cap on his head.
He had the feeling that Broussard's little lecture on science, while
factually accurate, was delivered more to obscure the facts than to
illuminate. "I'd better get to the bridge now, Broussard. Not that they
really need me, but ..." He left the sentence dangling, then turned and
walked briskly out of the observation room.
* * * * *
Once in the control room, he gave the dials and the illuminated screens
a rapid, practiced glance and then sat down in his chair to one side
of the operations panel. There was actually no known danger to this
shifting back and forth from one space to another. No ship had ever
encountered any difficulties whatsoever in doing so; there had never
been an accident of any kind during transition. The whole thing was
as completely automatic as man could make it, and apparently entirely
safe. But still Hawkins had never made the shift one way or another
without feeling a telltale tightening of muscles deep inside him, and
without wondering just what would happen if they got _stuck_ in all
that darkness.
"One minute, Captain," the watch officer reminded him. Hawkins nodded
in reply, his face illuminated by the flashing lights on the control
panel in front of him. He watched their changing signals calmly with
knowing eyes.
"Thirty seconds ... all drives off," sang out a voice. The hands on the
clock crept slowly around the dial.
"Zero...."
There was no sound, no feeling, no jerk nor jar, no noise to mark the
transition--nothing at all different from the moment before except a
slight increase in the total light flux in the room.
_Stars._
Captain Allen Hawkins smiled softly to himself. Stars ... something to
cling to, he whispered under his breath.
"Bridge from Navigation," came a voice close to his ear.
"Go ahead, Navigation," he said after pressing the communications
button.
"Looks like we hit it right on the nose, Captain," the Navigator told
him. "Can't tell just yet, of course, until I feed the positions of the
nearest stars into Betsy and she decides where we are. But it looks
good from here, and if I'm right, the one we're hunting for is about
eight o'clock high from the nose of the ship as she sits now. I'll
plot a course there right now. Do you want to wait until Betsy decides
that's the one, or shall we take a chance and head for it first?"
The Navigator always asked the question, but he knew what the answer
would be. "We'll start just as soon as you can give us the course,"
Hawkins replied.
"Aye, aye, Captain," the Navigator replied.
Hawkins turned to the officer on duty. "Mr. Smith, you will remain as
you are until you receive the course from the Navigator. Once you have
it, you will get underway immediately."
"Aye, aye, Captain," Smith replied.
"I'll be in my cabin if you want me," Hawkins said as he left the
bridge. He was rather tired and he meant to go straight to bed, but
somehow he found himself stopping by the observation room en route.
Broussard was still there, looking out of the window at the stars.
"Lovely, aren't they, Broussard?" Hawkins said.
"So you feel the stars are lovely?" the psychologist answered slowly.
"Yes, I do. They give us light, and hope for the future, and more than
that, a frame of reference when we fly through the dark reaches of our
universe. They're more than beautiful--they're necessary." As he turned
to leave, Hawkins chuckled to himself. Just let the head-shrinker try
to read a neurosis into that!
* * * * *
It took them three weeks from the day they arrived back in normal space
to make sure that they had found a sun with planets, and another three
weeks from then to make landfall on the second of the four satellites
this particular solar system had to offer. Almost from the very
beginning they were elated with their luck, for the planet seemed to be
a first class find. The _Sunward_ and her crew had been exploring this
section of space for more than six years, and out of the thirty-eight
systems they had investigated, this was the first that offered any
promise of eventual human habitation.
Man had been in space less then one hundred years. At first he had
thrown himself towards the stars with crude rocket-driven craft. A
few years later he had invented a type of atomic drive which allowed
him to approach the speed of light. But it was the discovery of the
subspace technique of travel which had theoretically given him the
whole universe to live in. There were drawbacks, however, and they
were important ones. To tear himself from the matrix of normal space
he still needed huge machines, and probably always would. This meant
the building of exceedingly large space vessels, like the _Sunward_,
which could contain not only the equipment necessary to propel him into
the blackness of subspace, but which also could be equipped with the
mammoth control mechanisms necessary to regulate the change-over. The
switch to subspace could never be made near the surface of a planet,
for the field forces generated during the change had far-flung effects
and were quite capable, even under tightest control, of tearing loose a
huge chunk of a planet and dropping it into subspace with the ship. Big
ships meant big money, and even now there were fewer than a thousand
of the large exploration craft in operation. Each ship could average
fewer than ten new worlds a year. So while man had taken a lease on the
universe, it seemed that at his present rate of exploration a great
many centuries would pass before he finished the charting of even the
stars in his own back yard.
But if at times he became discouraged at the immensity of the task,
there were always moments of great joy which helped to spur a man on.
The men of the _Sunward_ named the new star Clarion, and the habitable
planet they called Trellis. It was the second of three large and one
very small planets which circled Clarion. The _Sunward_ spent more
than two weeks circling over Trellis, making maps and checking the
atmosphere. Then the council of scientists on board picked a landing
site and Captain Hawkins brought the ship down on the spot they had
chosen. Exactly twenty-seven days from the hour they landed, the
council voted unanimously that Trellis was safe for human habitation,
and Allen Hawkins gave the orders to have the hatches opened to the
Trellian air.
The Captain, as was customary, was the first man to set foot on the
soil. He led the brief ceremonies that claimed the world as Earth's own
and then planted the Terran flag. He also took the customary measure of
declaring it a ship's holiday, and even threw out the first baseball
when the inevitable game started up later in the afternoon. But he
didn't stay to watch, preferring to stroll around the landscape by
himself for a little while.
He had been walking for a little more than an hour, traveling in a
wide circle around the ship, when he came upon Dr. Broussard, sitting
quietly under a shady tree, a book in one hand and a container of beer
in the other. The beer looked good and cold, and the shade looked
comfortable. "Mind if I join you?" Hawkins asked, and since he was
Captain of the ship, scarcely waited for an invitation before he sat
down and opened himself a beer. It tasted as good as it had looked, and
Hawkins soon found himself in an expansive mood. "Tell me, Broussard,"
he said good-naturedly. "How come you aren't out snooping around,
making sure that the crew's libidos aren't acting up or something."
Cocking an ear towards the distant ball field, rife with the excited
noise that always accompanies such a game, Broussard replied, "It
sounds to me as if the crew is getting about as much libidinal
discharge as I could hope for under the circumstances. That being the
case, I saw no reason why the ship's alienist shouldn't have a little
time off."
Hawkins leaned back comfortably against the tree. "Alienist. That's a
pretty strange word these days, Broussard. Used to be what they called
psychiatrists in England back in the old days, right?" Hawkins was of
vaguely English descent and felt it behooved him to know such things.
"That's right. They revived the term briefly a hundred years ago when
we first got out into space, because they thought that psychologists
might be needed for the first contacts with alien cultures." A slight
frown came over the man's face. "The word's fallen into disuse again of
late, however," he continued.