Did that truth go back fifteen years, to the time he had met the
kqyres, twenty years to the time he had first seen Lyddy? Or even
further back than that? Did it go back, say, twenty-four years, to the
time when he was sixteen and had killed his stepfather? He could still
see Karl Brodek lying there with his head crushed, could still feel the
terror rising in him at what he had done....
Then he had turned and fled the small community on Fairhurst--one of
the Clytemnestra planets--and made for the capital, where he shipped
out on one of the small tramp freighters that voyaged among the planets
of that system. None of the four other planets was human-inhabitable,
but two had mining stations, and one had a native civilization advanced
enough to make trading practicable, though not very profitable.
* * * * *
For the next four years, he drifted from one tenth-rate ship to
another, one ill-paid job to another. In all this time, he never left
the Clytemnestra System. As soon as he was satisfied that his former
neighbors were not going to set the law on his trail, he had no desire
to go away. It wasn't place-liking that kept him; it was dread of the
Jump.
Most spacemen never do quite get over their dread of the hyperspace
Jump, but with Len the dread amounted almost to a mania. He was ashamed
of the feeling, especially since he suspected he'd picked up that
extra dollop of terror from the creatures on the native planet.
Self-respecting colonials didn't associate with non-humans, but during
those first years of fear that his fellow men were hunting him, he'd
felt safe only with the flluska. He learned a little of their language,
and he spent such spare time as he had on Liman, their planet. He
couldn't breathe the atmosphere, but there were the trading domes;
nobody minded if he used them when there was no trade going on.
The flluska were a religious people, with gods and demons similar to
those of the terrestrial cosmogonies. Only, while their gods lived
conventionally in the sky, their demons lived in hyperspace. Len was
too unsophisticated himself to wonder how so primitive a people could
have evolved such a concept as hyperspace in their theology. He merely
grew to share their terror of it.
The year Len was twenty, the _Perseus_, one of the star freighters that
made the long haul from Castor to Capella, found itself in Fairhurst
Station short one deckhand. The man they'd shipped out with was in
jail, waiting to see whether a manslaughter or assault charge was
going to be lodged against him. The ship could not afford to wait. The
station was scoured for a replacement and Len Mattern was the best man
they could find.
Normally the starships did not take on untrained hands. Even the
lowliest crewman was supposed to have spent a minimum number of years
at the space schools, because in theory, all promotions came from
the ranks, even in the merchant service. But in spite of his lack of
training, they offered him the job. The bigline ships never liked to
sail shorthanded; in case of trouble, that could be a basis for legal
action.
* * * * *
Len knew the opportunity offered him was a dazzling one--not only far
more money than he'd ever seen before, but the chance of breaking out
of the system. He was afraid though, terribly afraid. "I've never made
the Jump," he told the second officer in a quavering voice.
"You'll never be a real spaceman until you do." The second officer was
patient, because he knew Mattern was his only chance of making the crew
up to its full complement.
"I've heard tell that--things change their shapes in Hyperspace."
"Maybe they do; maybe it's their real shapes you see out there. Who's
to tell what the truth is?"
Len licked dry lips and tried again. "They say there're people--beings,
anyway--_living_ in hyperspace." That tale he had heard from spacemen
who had made the Jump. Even if he'd believed in the flluska's
demons, he would have had the good sense not to admit such a
thing to a starship officer--a man of sophistication from the Near
Planets, perhaps even Earth herself. Still, spacemen were notorious
myth-spinners. Perhaps he had made a fool of himself, anyway.
But the second officer wasn't laughing. "Federation law says we should
have nothing to do with the creatures of hyperspace. If we leave them
alone, they don't bother us."
It would have been better if the officer had laughed at him and said
there was nothing in hyperspace but space. "Will we see them?"
"Does a ship going through ordinary space see any of us?" the officer
returned. "The creatures of hyperspace live on their own planets, and
we give those planets a wide berth. Simple as that." He added, "What
are you so afraid of, boy? Not a ship's been lost in hyperspace for
over two centuries, and there haven't been any blowups for years."
"Blowups?" Len repeated.
"Accidents. A technical term. You've taken worse risks shipping out in
those tincan tramps."
Finally, Len gave in--to his own common sense more than to the
officer's--and signed up for the voyage. He filled out the necessary
forms--hundreds of them, it seemed like. When it came to each line for
next of kin, he left a blank on every one.
"Haven't you any relatives at all?" the second officer asked, surprised.
"Not a one." Len didn't bother to mention that half-brother back on
Fairhurst; a five-year-old kid isn't much kin to speak of. Besides, the
boy probably didn't even know he had a brother--he'd been less than a
year old when Len left. One of the barren women must have adopted him
and brought him up as her own.
* * * * *
So Len Mattern filled out all the papers and was inscribed on the
ship's rolls. And he made the terrible jump through hyperspace for the
first time.
People who traveled on spaceships only as passengers never could
understand why the Jump was invariably referred to as "terrible."
That was because before the ship made the Jump they'd be given drugs,
in their cocktails, in their food at dinner, or in their drinking
water--and the next day they'd wake up and find they had slept right
through the whole thing, so it couldn't be so awful. Of course those
who traveled around the universe a lot were bound to catch on. Someday
they'd miss a meal or not drink anything and they'd find themselves
awake while the ship was Jumping. But the shipping lines didn't take
any chances and the aberrant passengers would also find themselves
locked in their cabins with smooth metal shutters where the mirrors
used to be.
But one thing that couldn't be helped: They couldn't be stopped from
looking down at themselves and seeing extra arms and legs; or finding
no arms and legs at all, but tentacles instead; or that their skin had
turned into shining scales or that there was an extra eye in the back
of their head. And when the time came for another Jump, they would
_ask_ to be drugged.
However, crewmen couldn't be drugged. They had to be awake to tend the
ship. The credo of the Space Service was that you couldn't trust a
machine to itself any more than you could trust an extraterrestrial, a
non-human. If a man wasn't in charge, ultimately everything would go
to pot. That was part of the space tradition, like the primitive axes
that hung on the bulkheads, so a man could smash his way to the modern
fire-fighting equipment. Except, of course, that if fire really broke
out, it would be quicker to press the button that sent the automatic
fire-fighting machines into immediate action. But still the axes hung
there, because they had always hung there--and, like all the metal on
the ship, they had to be kept polished.
Each time a ship made the Jump, the crewmen stayed awake. They saw
space and time change before their eyes. They saw their own fellows
turn into monsters. It was an awful thing to see, even though they
knew it wasn't actually a change, but a shift to another aspect of
themselves. Worse than the seeing was the _feeling_. It was like being
turned inside out, organ by organ--your heart and your liver and your
guts and all the rest, each carefully turned inside out, the way a
woman takes off her gloves, smoothing each one with great precision.
The hellish part was that it didn't hurt. A man felt as if he were
being twisted and wrenched apart, and it didn't hurt, and it was the
wrongness of that more than anything else that--well, that was why the
pay was so high on the starships. So many of them went mad.
* * * * *
All this Len Mattern had heard of and had expected--though no amount
of expectation could have braced him for that kind of reality. But
there was more to it than he had heard, and it was the extra part
that the second officer seemed curiously anxious to deny. "You saw
nobody--nothing at the portholes," he told Mattern after that first
Jump. "You just imagined it."
Mattern had been a spaceman long enough to be able to distinguish
imagination from reality. Perhaps the creatures of hyperspace did live
on planets, but it seemed they did not breathe the atmosphere of those
planets as human beings breathe air, and so they were not confined
to them. They could move around freely in the starless dusk of their
universe. And, if there was a pact, then they must be intelligent
creatures--though he would have known that anyway, for they spoke to
him. He could hear them through the tight walls of the ship--less in
his ears than his mind--cajoling, entreating, _promising_. And he shut
his ears and his mind, because he was afraid.
At the end of the voyage, he was offered a permanent berth on the
_Perseus_. "We don't usually take crewmen from the Far Planets," the
second officer said thoughtfully. "They don't have the training needed.
But you're a good deckhand."
Len waited tensely, not knowing whether he did want the job or not.
"The universe is opening up and sooner or later we're going to have to
start diversifying our crews, take untrained men, maybe even--" the
officer hesitated--"extraterrestrials. Sometimes training can restrict
a man to the point where he can't think for himself. Main trouble with
untrained men, though, is that often they've got too much imagination.
They think things that aren't true, see things that aren't there."
"I understand, sir," Mattern said. "I'll keep my imagination stowed
away until it's wanted."
From then on, he had seen no more at the ports than any of his
properly conditioned mates.