They had reached the very limits of space. Nothing lay ahead except the evil planet, waiting to destroy.
NOTES FROM CAPTAIN BRONET'S LOG: It looked like a lizard, or a snake with legs. It had a large flattish head, three eyes set in triangular formation, and a round food-intake in the centre of the "face." There was no chin. The head perched high on a mottled, leathery neck. The skin on its back was ribbed and corrugated. This creature was the first living thing we encountered on the sinister planet...
Release date:
November 28, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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THE old spaceman shuffled round the computer room on feet that were more used to wearing metallic grapples than boots. He was not by any means a big man—few spacemen are—and his face was lined and scarred through years of hazards and through much overexposure to radiation. He wore the colorful red uniform of the space pensioners, and there was in his eyes a look of sheer knowledge; it was partly the wisdom of age and partly the wisdom of space. He had been through the Warp a thousand times. He had blasted into hyperdrive more often than a man could count. He had carried everything from atomic mining equipment to agricultural implements. He had carried them to every known quarter of the universe. As the schooner men of old had plied their trade among the coral islands of far distant earth so long ago, so the old spaceman, and hundreds like him, plied their trade between those islands in space which men call galaxies.
The computer operator at the feeding bank nearest that section of the public gallery upon which the old man was walking raised a hand in friendly greeting. The red uniform fluttered proudly as the old man waved back. The space pensioner was joined by another uniformed figure.
“He’s a fine boy,” said the first.
“My grandson,” said the second proudly.
“Time flies,” said the first old spaceman.
“Aye, time and space, they both fly,” agreed the second.
“How long has your lad been on the big computer, then?”
“He’s fresh from the neophyte star school,” said the other old man.
There was a silence; the two old space dogs looked down at an incredible network of computer mechanism. They were actually inside it. It gave them the feeling of being small, parasitical animals inside a living brain. The enormity and power of the computer were borne in upon them very strongly.
“On a specialist course,” said the grandfather of the young computer man.
“Oh?” said the second. The syllable was vaguely interrogative.
“Only two lads were selected to do it.”
“Oooooh,” said the other old spaceman.
There was a pause.
“I don’t know what they call it technically,” said the computer man’s grandfather, “but it’s a—it has to do with—er—problem solving.”
“Oh,” said his monosyllabic friend, “problem solving, eh? I should have thought that was just a straightforward matter of intelligence.”
“Yes. But what is ‘intelligence’?” asked the other old spaceman.
“Ability to solve problems, I suppose,” answered his friend.
The first old spaceman was nodding away over the rail.
“There’s enough problems to solve,” he said. “Do you know what they’re feeding in there now?”
The other shook his head.
“They are feeding in the data from Galaxy 666.”
The other old spaceman blanched suddenly.
“I could do with an alco shot,” he said.
“So could I,” agreed his companion.
“There’s a bar at the end of the gallery, you know,” said the second. “I’ve got enough credits to see me through till next pension day, and a couple to spare; are you comin’?”
“Well, I never say ‘no.’ If we have the first one on you, the second one’s on me.”
“Spoken like a spaceman and a gentleman,” said the first.
The two old men shuffled off along the visitors’ gallery till they reached the bar.
“Now,” said the first, “tell me, my friend, you looked very surprised at the mention of Galaxy 666. What’s the matter with it?”
“Everything’s the matter with it!” answered Bion.
“You ever been?” asked Milka.
Bion nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “and I wish by the seven green moons of Gongle that I hadn’t!”
“That’s a strong oath for a spaceman to use,” said Milka.
“By the seven green moons of Gongle,” repeated Bion.
“Tell me about it,” invited Milka.
“If I did, you’d say it was only an old spaceman’s tale. Nobody takes any notice of the old-fashioned visual perception data these days. It’s only auto-data that they want to know about; v.p. data is out! It’s considered as unreliable as introspective psychology!”
“Well, I’m old-fashioned enough to put a little bit of credence in v.p. data,” said old Milka.
“You’ll only laugh at me if I tell you the story,” said Bion.
“A man who has been in space as long as we have, boy, doesn’t laugh at it. Only the gods can afford to laugh, because they own it. And I don’t suppose that even they find it very funny.”
“Well, if you’re sure you want to hear it, I’ll tell you the legend,” said Bion.
There was a mild, faint, gentle humming in the building all the time as the hundreds of thousands of millions of cells in the computer’s “brain” performed their endless functions.
“Of course, what I’ve got to say is already in there somewhere on a piece of tape. Somewhere in one of those memory banks,” said old Bion. “Somewhere in one of those memory banks it is being analyzed, evaluated, scrutinized electronically … what a laugh! What a crazy laugh! If that computer has got a sense of humor it must be rocking itself off its rivets!”
“Or else he’s going mad,” said Milka.
“Tin brains don’t go mad,” answered Bion.
“Because they’ve never had one go mad yet,” rejoined Milka, “that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen.”
“Of course it can’t happen,” said Bion.
“You’re an argumentative old man,” grinned Milka. “Stop being controversial and tell me the legend. Tell me your own account of it …”
“I WAS a young boy at the time,” said Bion, “about the same age as my grandson is now. Just come out of neophyte star school; universe lay at me feet. Hyperdrive wasn’t by any means new, but it was still new enough to be very exciting. Then there were the Warp men—why, we looked on them as demigods! They were like the old Trojan heroes. Some of the old men who were alive when I was a boy remembered the Warp men, remembered the first pioneers. They were very old men when the old men that I knew were boys. But still there was a living link; a living link,” he repeated. “That link has been broken for a long time now; it’s been broken for a very long time.” He sipped his alco appreciatively, and paused reflectively.
“We blasted off in one of the old light astracruisers. They weren’t bad, I suppose. Nowadays, of course, you only see them in the museums, but they served the purpose.”
“I know, I know. I started my service at the same time. I’ve ridden the old astros,” said Milka.
“We had a few months’ uneventful voyaging, agricultural equipment, mining machinery, medical supplies; had a couple of skirmishes with a few aliens that had long since been subdued and amalgamated into the empire and then—” he sighed wearily—“and then we got an assignment to conduct exploratory maneuvers around the fringe of Galaxy 666. We blasted off from the rim of 665, hit the Warp uneventfully, bashed out a computer course, and came up within rocketing distance of the rim star nearest to us in 666. It was crazy. The computer showed one set of figures. The v.p. scanners showed another set; we took a mean average and tried to blast in toward it. The closer we got to it, according to the figures, the farther away our eyes told us it was. The v.p. scanners were telling one set of lies, and the computer was telling an entirely different set, and that star sat there grinning and twinkling at us. Then suddenly, everything seemed to go to blazes in a bucket! The ship began leaping toward the star, or the star began leaping toward the ship—from that day to this I’m not quite sure which—but it happened! There was a flash, and the rocket crashed out on us. We were too near the gravitational field to use the hyperdrive, and we couldn’t get into the Warp any other way. We began plunging down, astracruiser and men, cargo and lives, straight into the glowing white heart of that sun—I’ll have another drink …”
“Sure, sure,” said Milka, “I’ll get you one.”
“My turn,” said Bion. He put a two-credit note on the table. Milka got up and fetched the drinks. There were special cheap rates for space pensioners. Maybe it was good to have some compensations … The old men in re. . .
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