Emptiness of Space Read online

  The second course was an excellent coupe of fruits I had never heard of, and, overall, iced passion-fruit juice. It was when the coffee came that he said, rather wistfully I thought:

  “I had hoped you might be able to help me, Mr. Myford, but it now seems to me that you are not a man of faith.”

  “Surely everyone has to be very much a man of faith,” I pro­tested. “For every­thing a man can­not do for him­self he has to have faith in others.”

  “True,” he conceded. “I should have said ‘spiritual faith’. You do not speak as one who is inter­ested in the nature and destiny of his soul — or of anyone else's soul — I fear?”

  I felt that I perceived what was coming next. However if he was inter­ested in saving my soul he had at least begun the oper­ation by looking after my bodily needs with a gene­rously good meal.

  “When I was young,” I told him, “I used to worry quite a lot about my soul, but later I decided that that was largely a matter of vanity.”

  “There is also vanity in thinking oneself self-sufficient,” he said.

  “Certainly,” I agreed. “It is chiefly with the con­cep­tion of the soul as a sepa­rate entity that I find myself out of sym­pathy. For me it is a mani­festation of mind which is, in its turn, a product of the brain, For me it is a mani­festation of mind which is, in its turn, a product of the brain, modi­fied by the exter­nal environ­ment and influ­enced more directly by the glands.”

  He looked saddened, and shook his head reprovingly.

  “You are so wrong — so very wrong. Some are always con­scious of their souls, others, like yourself, are una­ware of them, but no one knows the true value of his soul as long as he has it. It is not until a man has lost his soul that he under­stands its value.”

  It was not an obser­vation making for easy rejoinder, so I let the silence between us con­tinue. Presently he looked up into the northern sky where the trail of the moon-bound shuttle had long since blown away. With embar­rass­ment I observed two large tears flow from the inner corners of his eyes and trickle down beside his nose. He, how­ever, showed no embar­rass­ment; he simply pulled out a large, white, beauti­fully laun­dered hand­kerchief, and dealt with them.

  “I hope you will never learn what a dread­ful thing it is to have no soul,” he told me, with a shake of his head. “It is to hold the empti­ness of space in one's heart: to sit by the waters of Babylon for the rest of one's life.”

  Lamely I said:

  “I'm afraid this is out of my range. I don't understand.”

  “Of course you don't. No one under­stands. But always one keeps on hoping that one day there will come some­body who does under­stand and can help.”

  “But the soul is a mani­fes­ta­tion of the self,” I said. “I don't see how that can be lost — it can be changed, perhaps, but not lost.”

  “Mine is,” he said, still look­ing up into the vast blue. “Lost — adrift some­where out there. With­out it I am a sham. A man who has lost a leg or an arm is still a man, but a man who has lost his soul is nothing — nothing — nothing...”

  “Perhaps a psychiatrist—” I started to suggest, uncertainly. That stirred him, and checked the tears.

  “Psychiatrist!” he exclaimed scorn­fully. “Damned frauds! I Even to the word. They may know a bit about minds; but about the psyche! — why they even deny its existence...!”

  There was a pause.

  “I wish I could help...” I said, rather vaguely.

  “There was a chance. You might have been one who could. There's always the chance...” he said consolingly, though whether he was consoling himself or me seemed moot. At this point the church clock struck two. My host's mood changed. He got up quite briskly.

  “I have to go now,” he told me. “I wish you had been the one, but it has been a pleasant encounter all the same. I hope you enjoy Lahua.”

  I watched him make his way along the place. At one stall he paused, selected a peach-like fruit and bit into it. The woman beamed at him amiably, apparently un­concerned about pay­ment.

  The dusky waitress arrived by my table, and stood looking after him.

  “O le pauvre monsieur Georges,” she said sadly. We watched him climb the church steps, throw away the rem­nant of his fruit, and remove his hat to enter. “Il va jaire la prière,” she explained. “Tous les jours 'e make pray for 'is soul. In ze morning, in ze after­noon. C'est si triste.”

  I noticed the bill in her hand. I fear that for a moment I mis­judged George, but it had been a good lunch. I reached for my notecase. The girl noticed, and shook her head.

  “Non, non, monsieur, non. Vous êtes convive. C'est d'accord. Alors, monsier Georges 'e sign bill tomorrow. S'arrange. C'est okay,” she insisted, and stuck to it.

  The elderly man whom I had noticed before broke in:

  “It's all right — quite in order,” he assured me. Then he added: “Perhaps if you are not in a hurry you would care to take a café-cognac with me?”

  There seemed to be a fine open-handed­ness about Lahua. I accepted, and joined him.

  “I'm afraid no one can have briefed you about poor George,” he said.

  I admitted this was so. He shook his head in reproof of persons unknown, and added:

  “Never mind. All went well. George always has hopes of a stranger, you see: sometimes one has been known to laugh. We don't like that.”

  “I'm sorry to hear that,” I told him. “His state strikes me as very far from funny.”

  “It is indeed,” he agreed. “But he's impro­ving. I doubt whether he knows it him­self, but he is. A year ago he would often weep quietly through the whole dejeuner. Rather depres­sing until one got used to it.”

  “He lived here in Lahua, then?” I asked.

  “He exists. He spends more of his time in the church. For the rest he wanders round. He sleeps at that big white house up on the hill. His grand­daughter's place. She sees that he's decently turned out, and pays the bills for whatever he fancies down here.”

  I thought I must have misheard.

  “His granddaughter!” I exclaimed. “But he's a young man. He can't be much over thirty...”

  He looked at me.

  “You'll very likely come across him again. Just as well to know how things stand. Of course it isn't the sort of thing the family likes to publi­cize, but there's no secret about it.”

  The café-cognacs arrived. He added cream to his, and began:

  About five years ago (he said), yes, it would be in 2194, young Gerald Troon was taking a ship out to one of the larger aster­oids — the one that de Gasparis called Psyche when he spotted it in 1852. The ship was a space-built freighter called the Celestis working from the moon-base. Her crew was five, with not bad accom­mo­dation for­ward. Apart from that and the motor-section these ships are not much more than one big hold which is very often empty on the out­ward jour­neys unless it is carrying gear to set up new workings. This time it was empty because the assign­ment was simply to pick up a load of ura­nium ore — Psyche is half made of high-yield ore, and all that was neces­sary was to set going the digging machinery already on the site, and load the stuff in. It seemed simple enough.

  But the Asteroid Belt is still a very tricky area, you know. The main bodies and groups are charted, of course —but that only helps you to find them. The place is full of out-fliers of all sizes that you couldn't hope to chart, but have to avoid. About the best you can do is to tackle the Belt as near to your objec­tive as possible, reduce speed until you are little more than local orbit velo­city and then edge your way in, going very canny. The trouble is the time it can take to keep on fiddling along that way for thousands — hundreds of thousands, maybe — of miles. Fellows get bored and in­atten­tive, or sick to death of it and start to take chances. I don't know what the answer is. You can bounce radar off the big chunks and hitch that up to a course-de­flector to keep you away from them. But the small stuff is just as deadly to a ship, and there's so much of
it about that if you were to make the course-deflector sensi­tive enough to react to it you'd have your ship shying off every­thing the whole time, and getting nowhere. What we want is someone to come up with a kind of repulse mech­anism with only a limited range of opera­tion — say, a hundred miles — but no one does. So, as I say, it's tricky. Since they first started to tackle it back in 2150 they've lost half a dozen ships in there and had a dozen more damaged one way or another. Not a nice place at all ... On the other hand, uranium is uranium...

  Gerald's a good lad though. He had the authentic Troon yen for space with­out being much of a chancer; besides, Psyche isn't too far from the inner rim of the orbit — not nearly the approach problem Ceres is, for instance — what's more, he'd done it several times before.

  Well, he got into the Belt, and jockeyed and fiddled and niggled his way until he was about three hundred miles out from Psyche and getting ready to come in. Perhaps he'd got a bit care­less by then; in any case he'd not be expecting to find any­thing in orbit around the asteroid. But that's just what he did find — the hard way...

  There was a crash which made the whole ship ring round him and his crew as if they were in an enor­mous bell. It's about the nastiest — and very likely to be the last — sound a space­man can ever hear. This time, how­ever, their luck was in. It wasn't too bad. They dis­covered that as they crowded to watch the indi­cator dials. It was soon evi­dent that nothing vital had been hit, and they were able to release their breath.

  Gerald turned over the controls to his First, and he and the engineer, Steve, pulled space-suits out of the locker. When the airlock opened they hitched their safety-lines on to spring hooks, and slid their way aft along the hull on magnetic soles. It was soon clear that the damage was not on the air-lock side, and they worked round the curve of the hull.

  One can't say just what they expected to find — probably an embedded hunk of rock, or maybe just a gash in the side of the hold — any­way it was certainly not what they did find, which was half of a small space-ship projecting out of their own hull.

  One thing was evident right away — that it had hit with no great force. If it had, it would have gone right through and out the other side, for the hold of a freighter is little more than a single-walled cylinder: there is no need for it to be more, it doesn't have to conserve warmth, or contain air, or resist the friction of an atmos­phere, nor does it have to contend with any more gravi­tational pull than that of the moon; it is only in the living-quarters that there have to be the com­plex­ities necessary to sustain life.

  Another thing, which was imme­diately clear, was that this was not the only misad­venture that had befallen the small ship. Some­thing had, at some time, sliced off most of its after part, carrying away not only the driving tubes but the mixing-chambers as well, and leaving it hope­lessly disabled.

  Shuffling round the wreckage to inspect it, Gerald found no entrance. It was thoroughly jammed into the hole it had made, and its air-lock must lie forward, some­where inside the freighter. He sent Steve back for a cutter and for a key that would get them into the hold. While he waited he spoke through his helmet-radio to the operator in the Cel-estis's living-quarters, and explained the situation. He added:

  “Can you raise the Moon-Station just now, Jake? I'd better make a report.”

  “Strong and clear, Cap'n,” Jake told him.

  “Good. Tell them to put me on to the Duty Officer, win you.”

  He heard Jake open up and call. There was a pause while the waves crossed and re-crossed the millions of miles between them, then a voice :

  “Hullo, Celestis! Hullo Celestis! Moon-Station responding. Go ahead, Jake. Over!”

  Gerald waited out the exchange patiently. Radio waves are some of the things that can't be hurried. In due course another voice spoke.

  “Hello, Celestis! Moon-Station Duty Officer speaking Give your location and go ahead.”

  “Hullo, Charles. This is Gerald Troon calling from Cel-estis now in orbit about Psyche. Approx­imately three-twenty miles altitude. I am notifying damage by collision. No harm to personnel. Not repeat not in danger. Damage appears to be confined to empty hold-section. Cause of damage...” He went on to give parti­culars, and concluded: “I am about to inves­tigate. Will report further. Please keep the link open. Over!”

  The engineer returned, floating a self-powered cutter with him on a short safety-cord, and holding the key which would screw back the bolts of the hold's entrance-port. Gerald took the key, placed it in the hole beside the door, and inserted his legs into the two staples that would give him the pur­chase to wind it.

  The moon man's voice came again.

  “Hullo, Ticker. Under­stand no imme­diate danger. But don't go taking any chances, boy. Can you iden­tify the derelict?”

  “Repeat no danger,” Troon told him. “Plumb lucky. If she'd hit six feet farther for­ward we'd have had real trouble. I have now opened small door of the hold, and am going in to examine the fore­part of the dere­lict. Will try to iden­tify it.”

  The caver­nous dark­ness of the hold made it neces­sary for them to switch on their helmet lights. They could now see the front part of the derelict; it took up about half the space there was. The ship had punched through the wall, turning back the tough alloy in curled petals, as though it had been tin­plate. She had come to rest with her nose a bare couple of feet short of the opposite side. The two of them sur­veyed her for some moments. Steve pointed to a ragged hole, some five or six inches across, about half­way along the embedded section. It had a nasty sig­nifi­cance that caused Gerald to nod sombrely.

  He shuffled to the ship, and on to its curving side. He found the air-lock on the top, as it lay in the Celestis, and tried the winding key. He pulled it out again.

  “Calling you, Charles,” he said. “No iden­ti­fy­ing marks on the dere­lict. She's not space-built — that is, she could be used in at­mos­phere. Oldish pattern — well, must be — she's pre the stan­dard­ization of winding keys, so that takes us back a bit. Max­imum external dia­meter, say, twelve feet. Length unknown — can't say how much after part there was before it was knocked off. She's been holed for­ward, too. Looks like a small meteo­rite, about five inches. At speed, I'd say. Just a minute ... Yes, clean through and out, with a pretty small exit hole. Can't open the air-lock without making a new key. Quicker to cut our way in. Over!”

  He shuffled back, and played his light through the small meteor hole. His helmet prevented him getting his face close enough to see anything but a small part of the opposite wall, with a corres­ponding hole in it.

  “Easiest way is to enlarge this, Steve,” he suggested.

  The engineer nodded. He brought his cutter to bear, switched it on and began to carve from the edge of the hole.

  “Not much good, Ticker,” came the voice from the moon. “The bit you gave could apply to any one of four ships.”

  “Patience, dear Charles, while Steve does his bit of fancy-work with the cutter,” Troon told him.

  It took twenty minutes to complete the cut through the double hull. Steve switched off, gave a tug with his left hand, and the joined, inner and outer circles of metal floated away.

  “Celestis calling moon. I am about to go into the derelict, Charles. Keep open,” Troon said.

  He bent down, took hold of the sides of the cut, kicked his mag­netic soles free of contact and gave a light pull which took him floating head-first through the hole in the manner of an under­water swimmer. Presently his voice came again, with a different tone:

  “I say, Charles, there are three men in here. All in space-suits — old-time space-suits. Two of them are belted on to their bunks. The other one is ... Oh, his leg's gone. The meteorite must have taken it off ... There's a queer — Oh, God, it's his blood frozen into a solid ball...!”

  After a minute or so he went on:

  “I've found the log. Can't handle it in these gloves, though. I'll take it aboard, and let you have parti­cular
s. The two fellows on the bunks seem to be quite intact — their suits I mean. Their hel­mets have those curved strip-windows so I can't see much of their faces. Must've — that's odd ... Each of them has a sort of little book attached by a wire to the suit fastener. On the cover it has: ‘Danger — Perigoso’ in red, and, under­neath: ‘Do not remove suit — Read instructions within,’ repeated in Portu­guese. Then: ‘Hapson Survival System.’ What would all that mean, Charles? Over!”

  While he waited for the reply Gerald clumsily fingered one of the tag-like books and dis­covered that it opened con­certina-wise, a series of small metal plates hinged together printed on one side in English and on the other in Portu­guese. The first leaf carried little print, but what there was was striking. It ran ‘CAUTION! Do NOT open suit until you have read these instructions or you will KILL the wearer.’

  When he had got that far the Duty Officer's voice came in again:

  “Hullo, Ticker. I've called the Doc. He says do NOT, repeat NOT, touch the two men on any account. Hang on, he's coming to talk to you. He says the Hapson system was scrapped over thirty years ago — He — oh, here he is...”

  Another voice came in:

  “Ticker? Laysall here. Charles tells me you've found a couple of Hapsons, undamaged. Please confirm, and give circum­stances.”

  Troon did so. In due course the doctor came back: “Okay. That sounds fine. Now listen care­fully, Ticker. From what you say it's prac­tically certain those two are not dead — yet. They're — well, they're in cold storage. That part of the Hapson system was good. You'll see a kind of boss mounted on the left of the chest. The thing to do in the case of extreme emer­gency was to slap it good and hard. When you do that it gives a multiple injec­tion. Part of the stuff puts you out. Part of it prevents the build­ing-up in the body of large ice crystals that would damage the tissues. Part of it — oh well, that'll do later. The point is that it works prac­tically a hundred per cent. You get Nature's own deep­freeze in space. And if there's some­thing to keep off direct radia­tion from the sun you stay like that until some­body finds you — if any­one ever does. Now I take it that these two have been in the dark of an air­less ship which is now in the airless hold of your ship. Is that right?”