Benteley was silent a moment. “Yes,” he said finally.
Eleanor sighed. “Thank God. I’m so glad.”
Benteley leaned over and set down his glass on the low table. “I swore on; I took an oath to Verrick. I don’t have any choice, unless I want to break my oath and run out on him.”
“It’s been done.”
“I’ve never broken my oath. I got fed up with Oiseau-Lyre years ago but I never tried to get away. I could have; I’d take the risk of being caught and killed. I accept the law that gives a protector the power of life and death over escaped serfs. But I don’t think an oath should be broken, by either the serf or the protector.”
“I thought you said it was crumbling.”
“It is. But I don’t want to help it along.”
Eleanor set her glass down and reached up to put her smooth bare arms around his neck. “What kind of a life have you had? What have you done? Have you lived with very many women?”
“A few.”
“What were they like?”
Benteley shrugged. “Various kinds.”
“Were they nice?”
“I guess so.”
“Who was the last?”
Benteley thought back. “A few months ago. A class 7–9 girl named Julie.”
Eleanor’s green eyes were fixed on him intently. “Tell me what she was like.”
“Small. Pretty.”
“Very much like me?”
“Your hair is nicer.” He touched the girl’s soft, flame-red hair. “You have very nice hair. And eyes.” He took her tight against him and held her for a long time. “You’re very nice.”
The girl’s small fist was clutched around the charms that rested between her breasts. “It’s all coming out right. Luck, very good luck.” She stretched up to kiss him on the mouth; her warm, intense face vibrated against his for a moment and then she sank back down with a sigh. “It’s going to be good, all of us working here together, being together.”
Benteley said nothing.
After a time Eleanor detached herself from him and lit a cigarette. She sat gazing seriously at him, arms folded, chin up, eyes large and solemn. “You’re going a long way, Ted. Verrick thinks a lot of you. I was so afraid when you did that, last night. When you said those things. But he liked it. He respects you; he thinks you have something on the ball. And he’s right! There’s something unique and strong inside you.” She added pathetically, “Golly, I wish I could teep you. But it’s gone, it’s really gone.”
“I wonder if Verrick knows how much you gave up.”
“Verrick has more important things to think about.” Her voice caught with sudden excitement. “Tomorrow maybe we’ll be back in! Things will be the way they were before, the way you wanted them to be. Won’t that be wonderful?”
“I guess so.”
Eleanor put down her cigarette and leaned over quickly to kiss him. “And you really will be along with us? You’ll really help operate Pellig?”
Benteley nodded faintly. “Yes.”
“Then everything’s perfect.” She gazed up hungrily into his face, green eyes hot and excited in the semi-gloom. Her breath came quick and harsh, sweet-scented in his face. “Are these rooms all right? Are they large enough? Do you have many things to bring?”
“Not many,” Benteley said. A dull, heavy weight seemed to hang over him, a listless torpor. “This is fine.”
With a contented sigh, Eleanor slid away from him and with a single lithe motion swept up her glass. She snapped off the lamp and lay back happily against him. The only light was the glow of her cigarette resting in the little copper ashtray. The deep low color of burning flame radiated from the girl’s hair and lips. The nipples of her breasts seemed darkly luminous in the twilight. After a time Benteley turned to her, stirred by the steady lights of her body.
They lay satiated and languid, among their crumpled clothes, bodies steaming moistly with fulfilled love. Eleanor stretched her bare arm to collect what remained of her cigarette. She brought it to her lips, close to Benteley’s face, and breathed the oddly sweet scent of sexual satisfaction into his eyes, and nose, and mouth.
“Ted,” she whispered presently, “I’m enough for you, aren’t I?” She pulled herself up a trifle, a flow of muscles and flesh. “I know I’m sort of … small.”
“You’re fine,” he said vaguely.
“There isn’t anybody you remember you’d rather be with?” When there was no answer, she went on, “I mean, perhaps I’m not really much good at it, am I?”
“Sure. You’re swell.” His voice was empty, toneless. He lay against her inert and lifeless. “Just right.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Benteley said. He struggled to his feet and moved dully away from her. “I’m just tired. I think I’ll turn in.” His voice gained sudden harshness. “As you said, tomorrow should be a big day.”
NINE
Leon Cartwright was eating breakfast with Rita O’Neill and Peter Wakeman when the ipvic relay operator notified him that a closed-circuit transmission from the ship had been picked up.
“Sorry,” Captain Groves said, as each faced the other across billions of miles of space. “I see it’s morning there. You’re still wearing your old blue dressing gown.”
Cartwright’s face was pale and haggard. And the image was bad; extreme distance made it waver and fade. “Where exactly are you?” he asked, in a slow, hesitant voice.
“Forty astronomical units out,” Groves answered. Cartwright’s appearance was a shock to him, but he was not certain how much was due to the distortions of long-distance relay transmission. “We’ll start moving out into uncharted space soon. I’ve already switched over from the official navigation charts to Preston’s material.”
The ship had gone perhaps halfway. Flame Disc held an orbit of twice the radius vector of Pluto—assuming that it existed. The orbit of the ninth planet marked the limit of charted exploration; beyond it lay an infinite waste about which little was known and much had been conjectured. In a short while the ship would pass the final signal buoys and leave the finite, familiar universe behind.
“A number of the group want to go back,” Groves said. “They realize they’re leaving the known system. This is their last chance to jump ship; if they don’t do it now, they’re stuck to the end.”
“How many would jump if they could?”
“Perhaps ten. Or more.”
“Can you go on without them?”
“We’ll have more food-stuffs and supplies. Konklin and his girl Mary are staying. The old carpenter, Jereti. The Japanese optical workers, our jet stoker … I think we can make it.”
“Let them jump, then, if it won’t jeopardize the ship.”
“When you and I talked before,” Groves said, “I didn’t have a chance to congratulate you.”
Cartwright’s distorted image roused itself wearily. “Congratulate me? All right. Thanks.”
“I wish I could shake your hand, Leon,” Groves held his big dark hand up to the ipvic screen; Cartwright did the same, and their fingers appeared to touch. “Of course, you people there on Earth are used to it, by this time.”
A muscle in Cartwright’s cheek twitched spasmodically. “I have trouble believing it, myself. It seems like a kind of nightmare I can’t wake up from.”
“Nightmare! You mean the assassin?”
“That’s right.” Cartwright grimaced. “He’s supposed to be on his way. I’m sitting here waiting for him to show up.”
When he had concluded the transmission, Groves called Konklin and Mary into the control bubble and briefed them in a few unemotional words. “Cartwright agrees to let them jump ship. That takes care of them; at dinner I’ll make the announcement.”
He indicated a dial that had glowed into life. “See that rusty needle start moving? That’s the first time this indicator has reacted in the whole existence of the ship.”
“It means nothing to me,” Konklin said.
<
br /> “That irregular pattern is a robot signal; I could slick it over to aud and you’d probably recognize it. That marks the final limit of charted space. No ships go beyond this distance except scientific expeditions making abstract tests.”
“When we claim the Disc,” Mary said, eyes wide, “that marker will be pulled down.”
“The expedition of ’89 found nothing,” Konklin pointed out easily. “And they had all Preston’s data, everything he did.”
“Maybe what Preston saw was an extra-large space serpent,” Mary suggested half-humorously, half-wanly. “Maybe it’ll devour us, like in the stories people tell.”
Groves eyed her stonily. “I’ll handle the navigation. You two go and supervise the loading of the lifeboat, so we can get the jumpers off. You’re sleeping down in the hold, aren’t you?”
“Down with everybody else,” Konklin said.
“When the lifeboat’s gone you can probably claim one of the cabins. Most of them will be empty—take any one you want.” Sourly, Groves added: “Most of the ship will be empty, I’m afraid.”
The hold had been the infirmary. The two of them carefully swept and cleaned every surface inch. Mary washed the walls and ceiling, mopped the floor and painstakingly dusted the vent grills. “There’s not so much metallic grit in here,” she said hopefully to Konklin, as she lugged waste debris to the disposal slot.
“This was for the crew.”
“If the ship lands all right, perhaps we could use this for our permanent living quarters. It’s better than I had back on Earth.” Throwing herself wearily down on the little iron cot, she slid off her sandals. “You have a cigarette? Mine are gone.”
Konklin moodily gave her his pack. “That’s the works.”
Lighting up gratefully, Mary leaned back and closed her eyes. “It’s peaceful, here. Nobody standing out in the corridors shouting.”
“Too quiet. I keep thinking of what’s outside. No-man’s-land. Between systems. God, the cold! It’s all around us, out there. Coldness, silence, death … if not worse.”
“Don’t think about it. We should keep busy.”
“When it comes down to it we’re not such fanatics after all. It seemed like a good idea, a tenth planet for everybody to migrate to. But now that we’re really out here—”
Troubled, Mary asked: “Are you mad at me?”
“I’m mad at all of us. Half the group has already jumped. I’m mad because Groves is sitting up there in the control bubble trying to plot a course on the basis of a madman’s mystic guess instead of accurate scientific data. I’m mad because this ship is a broken-down old ore-carrier, about to burst apart.” He finished, “I’m mad because we’ve passed the last marker and nobody comes this way but visionaries and crackpots.”
“Which are we?” Mary asked, in a small voice.
“We’ll find out, one of these days.”
Mary reached up shyly and took hold of his hand. “Even if we don’t get there, this will be awfully nice.”
“This? This little cell? Like a monk’s cell?”
“I think so.” She gazed up at him earnestly. “This is what I wanted, before. When I was moving around aimlessly, looking everywhere. Going from one person to the next. I didn’t want to be a bed girl … but I didn’t really know what I wanted. Now I think I’ve found it. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you—you’ll be mad again. I have a charm I made up to bring you to me. Janet Sibley helped me with it; she’s good at fixing them. I wanted you to love me very much.”
Konklin smiled and leaned down to kiss her.
Abruptly, soundlessly, the girl winked out of existence. A sheet of glaring white flame filled the room around him; there was nothing else, only the cold glittering fire that billowed everywhere, a universe of shimmering incandescence that ate away all shapes and being, that left nothing but its own self.
He pulled back, stumbled, and fell into the lapping sea of light. He wept, cried piteously, tried to creep away, scrabbled and clutched and moaned. He groped futilely for something, anything to hang on to, but there was only the limitless expanse of dazzling phosphorescence.
And then the voice began.
It started deep inside him and bloomed to the surface in a vast rush. The sheer force of it stunned him. He sank down, babbled crazed nonsense, lay in a foetal heap, bewildered and helpless, blasted to limp, inert protoplasm. The voice thundered in him and around him, a world of sound and fire that consumed him completely. He seemed a wad of shriveled-up debris, a seared ruin, cast out by the raging inferno of living energy.
“Earth ship,” the voice said. “Where are you going? Why are you here?”
The sound thrilled through Konklin, as he lay helpless, sprawled in the lake of foaming light. The voice ebbed and flowed like the fire itself, a pulsing mass of raw energy that lashed at him relentlessly, within and without.
“This is beyond your system,” the voice echoed through his crushed brain. “You have gone outside. Do you understand that? This is the middle space, the emptiness between your system and mine. Why have you come so far? What is it you are after?”
In the control bubble, Groves struggled desperately against the current of fury that washed over his body and mind. He crashed blindly against the navigation table; instruments and charts rained down and danced around him like hot sparks. The voice continued harshly, without pause, a burning arrogance roaring in it, a vast contempt for the beings it spoke to.
“Fragile Earthmen, venturing out here, go back to your own system! Go back to your little orderly universe, your strict civilization. Stay away from the regions you do not know! Stay away from darkness and monsters!”
Groves stumbled against the hatch. Groping feebly, he managed to creep from the bubble into the corridor. The voice came again, a staggering crash of pure force that impaled him against the battered hull of the ship.
“I see you seek the tenth planet of your system, the legendary Flame Disc. Why do you seek it? What do you want with it?”
Groves shrieked in terror. He knew, now, what this was, The Voices—prophesied in Preston’s book. Desperate hope plucked at Groves. The Voices that led … He opened his mouth to speak, but the booming roar cut him savagely off.
“Flame Disc is our world. Carried by us across space to this system. Set in motion here, to circle your sun for eternity. You have no right to it. What is your purpose? We are curious.”
Groves tried to direct his thoughts outward. In a brief wheeling instant of time he tried to project all his hopes, plans, all the needs of the race, mankind’s vast yearnings …
“Perhaps,” the voice answered. “We will consider and analyze your verbalized thoughts … and your submarginal impulses. We must be careful. We could incinerate your ship, if we cared to.” There was a momentary pause, and then the voice continued reflectively. “Not for the present, at least. We must take time.”
Groves found the ipvic transmission room. He stumbled to the transmitter; it was a vague shape dancing beyond the rim of white fire. His fingers flung on the power: closed circuits locked automatically in place.
“Cartwright,” he gasped. Across the void the beamed signal speared its way to the Directorate monitor at Pluto and from there to Uranus. From planet to planet the thin signal cut, relayed directly to the office at Batavia.
“Flame Disc was placed within your system for a reason,” the great voice continued. It paused, as if consulting with invisible companions. “Contact between our races might bring us to a new level of cultural integration,” it went on presently. “But we must—”
Groves huddled over the transmitter. The image was too remote; his blinded eyes failed to catch it. He prayed feverishly that the signal was getting across, that back at Batavia Cartwright was seeing what he saw, hearing the vast booming voice he heard, understanding the terrifying, yet incredibly hopeful words.
“We must study you,” the voice continued. “We must know more about you. We do not decide quickly. As your ship is guided toward Flame D
isc we will reach a decision. We will decide whether to destroy you—or to lead you to safety on Flame Disc, to a successful conclusion of your expedition.”
Reese Verrick accepted the ipvic technician’s hurried call. “Come along,” he snapped to Herb Moore. “The bug on Cartwright’s ship. A transmission’s coming across to Batavia, something important.”
Seated before the vid-tap the ipvic technicians had set up for Farben, Verrick and Moore gazed with incredulous amazement at the scene. Groves, a miniature figure, lost in rolling flame, was dwarfed to the size of a helpless insect by the surge of pure energy that played around him. From the aud speaker above the screen the booming voice, distorted and dimmed by millions of miles of space, thundered out.
“… our warning. If you attempt to ignore our friendly efforts to guide your ship, if you try to navigate on your own, then we cannot promise …”
“What is it?” Verrick croaked, blank-faced and dazed. “Is this rigged? Are they glimmed on the bug, trying to dazzle us with this set-up?” He began to tremble. “Or is this really—”
“Shut up,” Moore grated. He peered hastily around. “You have a tape running on this?”
Verrick nodded, slack-jawed. “What have we got in on, in God’s name? There’s those legends and rumors of fabulous beings out there, but I never believed them. I never thought it could really be true!”
Moore examined the vid and aud tape recorders and then turned briskly to Verrick. “You think this is a supernatural manifestation, do you?”
“It’s from another civilization.” Verrick quavered with awe and terror. “This is incredible. We’ve made contact with another race.”
“Incredible is right,” Moore said tartly. As soon as the transmission ceased, and the screen had faded into black silence, he snatched up the tapes and hurried them out of the Farben buildings to the Public Information Library.
Within an hour the analysis was in, from the main Quiz research organs in Geneva. Moore grabbed the report up and carried it to Reese Verrick.