News From Elsewhere (4 page)

“Forty-five seconds,” said that damnably calm automatic voice. “Thirty seconds . . . fifteen seconds . . . ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—zero!”

And then' there was nothing—no lurch, no pressure, no sudden stress. Only a great vacancy, a sensation of utter darkness, a sharp instantaneous dream of unbeing, and then only the bare memory of the dream.

In the dimensions of physical space, the
Santa Maria
and all aboard her had ceased to exist. Where, before, a tiny metallic capsule—a caravel of explorers—had surged out from the dustlike brood of planets circling one of the innumerable suns, there was now nothing. The track of a strange silver bullet, coursing at a fantastic speed that was yet a mere snail’s pace through the long deserts of the home galaxy, had stopped suddenly. There was no wreckage, there were no survivors. For what had existed in the apparent reality of space-time was now as if it had never been. . . .

Captain Mauris was alone. He was alone because there 
was nothing else. He was alone with the illusion of his own existence. The stillness had settled like a slow inward frost.

His premonition was justified. In a vacancy of nonsensation, there was yet the overwhelming weight of a curious fatigue—as if, at the moment of deceleration, the material cosmos had suddenly become too tired to hold together. As if Mauris himself must support the tiredness of a phantom universe.

“So this is what it’s like to be dead,” he mumbled in a sleepy voice. He was surprised. He was pulled up with a sickening jolt. He had heard his own voice, reverberating as in an empty room.. .. The voice that followed was less of a shock than this disturbing mockery of survival.

“Captain Mauris! Captain Mauris! Soon you will be too tired to be dead, too cold to be an illusion. For you are condemned to be reborn.”

It was a woman’s voice, low, musical, drifting without urgency through the deep canyons of unbeing.

Mauris listened, appalled. It was a voice he recognized—the voice of a woman he might have married, a familiar voice, belonging to one he had never known.

“Who are you?” he called desperately, hearing the words echo on a wall of blackness.

There was laughter tumbling through the emptiness of stars.

“Mary Smith,” said the voice, “Betty Jones, and Pearl White. Marie-Antoinette, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy.”

“I am mad!” cried Captain Mauris. “The stars are dark, and still there is something left to dream.”

“You are unborn,” said the voice gently. “Have patience.”

Captain Mauris tried to move and could not, for there was nothing to move, no location to be changed.

“Who am I?” he shouted wildly.

“Captain Mauris.”

“There is no Captain Mauris,” he yelled savagely. “He is unborn, therefore he has never lived!”

“You are learning,” came the answer, softly. “You are learning that it is necessary to wait.”

“Who am I?” he demanded urgently.

The laughter came like an invisible tide, sweeping him on its crest

“Punchinello,” said the voice gaily, “Prometheus, Simple Simon, Alexander the Great.”

“Who am I?” he called insistently.

“You are no one. . . . Who knows? Perhaps you will become the first man. Perhaps you are waiting to be Adam.”

“Then you are—”

Again die dark surge of laughter.

“I am the echo of a rib that has yet to sing.”

“The rib is nowhere,” said Mauris, drowsy with the effort of words. “It belongs to me, and I am unborn. . . . Nowhere.”

“Limbo,” whispered the voice.

“Nowhere,” mumbled Mauris.

“Limbo,” insisted the voice.

“No . . . where,” repeated Mauris weakly, fighting the cold fatigue of stillness, the weight of unbeing.

He could feel the laughter gathering, and knew that it would drown him. Desperation fought against the blind weariness sucking him into the heaving tide of sound. He tried to remember what it was like to pray.

“Oh, God,” he whispered, “if I cannot die, let me become alive. Let there be light!”

Once more the laughter struck. And the whirlpool opened.

There were no stars yet, but the light came like a pallid finger, probing the interior of the stricken ship. Captain Mauris looked about him at dim shapes, and the sensation of wonder grew while fear plucked its familiar music from his taut nerves.

There was something wrong—desperately wrong!

Suddenly he understood. Everything had been reversed.

The copper cylinder, which had been bolted to the deck on the port side of the main control panel, now lay on the starboard side, its smooth fiery surface crumpled like paper. Below it on the deck lay beads of still liquid copper rain.

The starboard electrochron, with its numerals reversed, now lay on the port side, above the gaping hole where the lightometer had been.

Captain Mauris turned his head to look at Kobler, but Phylo’s berth now lay there in place of the physicist’s. The 
Captain knew without moving that his first officer was dead. Phylo stared at the deckhead, his features locked in a permanently vacant smile.

Glancing around at the S.F.P. chief in Phylo’s old place, Captain Mauris saw that Kohler’s body was entirely relaxed. His eyes were closed, and in death he had the appearance of one who is concentrating very hard. Judging from his expression, thought Mauris, he had been trying
in extremis
to discover his error.

The navigation deck of the
Santa Maria
was a mausoleum—through the looking glass. Everything—even, as Mauris discovered, the parting in his own hair—had been reversed. He knew, without feeling the necessity to confirm it by exploration, that he was the last man alive. The
Santa Maria,
with the sole exception of its Captain, was maimed entirely by the dead.

“Poor devils,” said Captain Mauris aloud. “Poor devils, they couldn’t take the stillness. It made them too tired— dead tired!” The sound of his own voice, normal now, gave
him
greater grasp on reality.

With ponderous, heavy movements, like a drunken man, he undid the straps of his contour berth and straggled wearily to his feet. He went across to Kobler, feeling for his pulse with a forlorn hope.

“Dead tired,” repeated Mauris slowly. He gazed ruefully at Kobler’s pale face, set in a last frown of concentration. “
There are more things in heaven and earth
, 
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy
.”

Mauris felt neither regret nor satisfaction. There was no joy in knowing that he had the final word, that Kobler would never laugh that one away.

Presently he pulled himself together and made a cautious tour of the ship. He was as methodical as if it was a monthly routine inspection, and checked everything from the conditioner to the recycling plant. The ship, he noted ironically, was in perfect condition—but for two small details: the planetary and stellar drives were completely wrecked. Apart from the fact that the landing retard and auxiliary brake rockets were intact, the
Santa Maria
was at the mercy of normal gravity fields.

There were only two reasonable possibilities. She might coast merrily in the void forever, or drop eventually into a sun. The alternative was too improbable for consideration, 
for the chances of falling into the gravity field of an hospitable planet were several billion billion to one.

Finally Captain Mauris was confronted with the task he had been subconsciously shirking. Steeling himself against a paralyzing reluctance, he climbed up into the astrodome and looked at the stars.

He did not need star charts to tell him that this was not the home galaxy. As he gazed at the sharp, unfamiliar patterns, an already tight band seemed to constrict around his heart. . . . Perhaps Kobler had succeeded. Perhaps the galaxy M 81 had been entered by a terrene ship for the first time. . . . Much good it would do die United Space Corporation!

With a grim smile, Mauris recalled that final paragraph of the ship’s articles.
If the Master should satisfy himself, and the authorized scientists concerned, that the danger factor is sufficient
... It was really very funny! Probably, sixteen hundred thousand light-years away on a speck of cosmic dust, the Field Testing Executive had already set up their officious Court of Inquiry to consider possible reasons for the loss of their experimental ship.

Then suddenly he realized that if the
Santa Maria
had indeed reached M 81, the planet Earth was not only sixteen hundred thousand light-years away, it was also sixteen hundred thousand years ago.

He had a sudden image of the Field Testing Executive with apelike faces, sitting and jabbering pompously around a mud pool in some prehistoric steamy jungle. ... And Mauris laughed. He laughed loudly, raucously. He laughed until he cried—until weariness, in a sudden triumph, toppled
him
senseless on the deck. And there he lay, sleeping like a child whose nightmares materialize only when he is awake.

He never knew how long he slept. He was eventually wakened by a sharp, agonizing pain in his stomach. At last, through a fog of bewilderment, he diagnosed it as hunger. He staggered along to the mess deck and operated the food delivery controls. A minute and a half later he pulled a nicely roasted chicken, complete with potatoes and green peas, from the electronic cooker. He ate ravenously and followed it up with cheese and biscuits, coffee and liquer brandy. The brandy was a special bottle that 
had been optimistically saved for a celebration banquet. As he sipped it luxuriously, Captain Mauris thought of all the guests who were unable to attend. Gravely, he included Kobler, Phylo, and all the rest of the
Santa Maria’s
personnel in the toast: “Absent friends!” Then he took the old corncob pipe from his pocket and lit up. Presently Captain Mauris was feeling almost human.

He spent the rest of the “day” launching dead bodies into space. Wearing his combination pressure suit, Captain Mauris lugged them one after another through the airlock and gave them a shove. Kobler, Phylo, and the rest went sailing smoothly out into the starry darkness. To each one, Captain Mauris gave a personal farewell, as if he might have been expecting an answer.

Presently die
Santa Maria
was surrounded by a slowly dispersing shoal of flying corpses whose presence was suggested only where they blotted out the background of unwinking stars.

Finally, when all that unwelcome furniture had been jettisoned, the Captain went back to the navigation deck and made the ship accelerate for three seconds on her auxiliary rockets, thus leaving the shoal behind. Having accomplished this disagreeable task, Mauris felt much better.

But as he clambered into the astrodome for a further check on the unfamiliar star positions, it dawned on him that he had probably looked on a human face for the last time.

Nine “days” later by the ship’s electrochron, Captain Mauris became convinced that he would not have to wait much longer. The star on the port bow had grown to the size of a penny. Presently it would grow to the size of a football. Presently the
Santa Maria
and her Captain would reach the end of their journey—in the purification of celestial fire.

He had already resigned himself calmly to his destiny and was, in truth, a little pleased that Fate had arranged a definite appointment with death for him. It was certainly preferable to drifting aimlessly for months, waiting until the food supply was exhausted, waiting until he went mad or plucked up enough courage to make the appointment on his own initiative.

The condemned man continued to eat hearty break
fasts, and settled down to enjoy in Ms last days what he had never yet experienced throughout his life—a period of sustained leisure. A period of rest and tranquility, interrupted by nothing more serious than the push-button operations necessary for providing first-class meals.

Captain Mauris spent more and more time in the ship’s library, projecting the microfilms of books he had never had the time to read. Intuitively he went to the old writers, ranging at a leisurely pace through fiction and nonfiction, from Plato to Dickens, from Homer to H.G. Wells. He also browsed through the Bible, and amused himself by translating its profound convictions into the sort of language that Kobler used.

By die eighteenth day Captain Mauris was confused, disappointed, excited, and afraid. The now brilliantly blinding sun had changed its position from port bow to starboard quarter. Its place on the port bow had been taken by what seemed to be a green marble. Captain Mauris knew it was not another sun, and tried desperately not to allow himself to hope that it might be a habitable planet. Better to die by falling into an alien sun than survive, a castaway, on an unknown planet in some alien galaxy. . . . His reason said so, but his emotions remained unconvinced.

It was then, for no reason at all, that he suddenly remembered the voice and the dreamlike laughter he had experienced in the total darkness, the absolute stillness of the galactic jump.

And Captain Mauris had a premonition.