Mission to Universe Read online

  He broke down, telling Ben about it.

  “I know it’s my imagination,” he said to Ben, chokingly. “It must have been imagination that made me see some-thing in the warehouse—or maybe it was just some waterfront bum who’d crawled in there to sleep off a drunk. I don’t know. But it doesn’t help! It doesn’t help to know it was imagination. Every time I fall asleep I go right on dreaming about the Rat King!”

  “Yes,” said Ben, evenly. “Everybody’s got something like that. It’s always something we’ve never told anyone—or something no one would believe when we tried to tell it. Mine’s a grizzly bear.”

  “Yours—?” For the first time John looked up.

  “Up in the Canadian Rockies,” said Ben. “When I was seven years old. It was just about twilight and I was cut-ting through a little patch of woods from one cabin to another. I—thought I saw a grizzly.”

  He had not thought it. He had seen the bear, but for John’s sake he left the matter in doubt. Ben proceeded to tell the story, and even here telling it brought everything back to him with a rush.

  His father had been a geologist. It was a summer camp to survey some mineral properties for a mining firm. The camp followed the angle of a small river, making an artificial L-shaped clearing among the trees. Ben had been to the stables—why he could not remember now—and running back to the family cabin at the other end of the clearing, he had decided to cut through the point of woods in the angle instead of following the clearing around.

  He had been running as fast as he could go. Then, running was something like breathing—done without effort. His feet flew and his body rode them like galloping horses. He flew through the corridors of white birch and pine. The scent of the pine needles was in his nose. The twilight made everything different. He pounded the earth with his feet and the world flew by around him.

  Running so, drunk with his own speed, he was half-way across the small natural clearing before he saw. And he stopped. The world stopped. Just before him, on the edge of the clearing where he would have run into it in a few steps more, was the bear.

  It was not black. It was gray, and it was bigger than any black bear. It was standing upright and facing him.

  He did not move. He stood still, caught still in the open center of the clearing. Don’t run—the thought hammered in him. He had been told that by everybody. Don’t run from a wild animal. A strange coldness began at the back of his neck and flowed through him. He reached down without quite knowing what he was doing and picked up a stick at his feet. There was no reason for it. The stick was only a twig about two feet long and branched at the end. —When they come and find me, he thought, they will find I had a stick in my hand.

  He looked up at the bear. Massive, towering, vast, it stood with one forepaw hooked over the horizontal limb of a small tree. The fur of the underarm was lighter and there was a streak of light fur on the loose skin of the throat.—And then he saw that the eyes of the bear were not on him. The underside of the bluntly v-shaped, dog-like jaw was raised to him. The black nose was searching the light upper movement of the air among the trees. All that had happened, from the moment he had stopped until now, had happened in next to no time at all.

  He began to step quietly away, sideways, toward the trees. He did not think of the trees as a place to hide,he simply went to them, as he had stopped stock-still on seeing the bear, without thinking. He moved quietly sideways, and the bear stood, and after a little the trees were around him, and a little after that the bear was out of sight, and he ran on home.

  Ben stopped talking. John Edlung was watching him, quiet now.

  “So you see,” said Ben. He turned and unlocked one of the glass cupboards. “Here,” he said, taking out a small box and opening it to get a single green-and-white capsule out. “These are tranquilizers. Take a couple now, and take a couple more before you try to sleep. You shouldn’t dream—of rats, anyway.”

  That was the end of the business, for the moment at least. Ben told John to stay off duty for a while and take the tranquilizers, then come and tell Ben if the nightmares had ceased. But the whole affair had set Ben to wondering. How many others of those aboard, he wondered,were being visited in their dreams by their own personal shapes of fear?

  Meanwhile, the planet had been orbited, and Observation was beginning to check it out from an altitude of a hundred miles.

  It was an amazingly Earth-like world, even to the two longitudinal ocean areas, and the continental masses in northern and southern hemispheres between oceans. The ecology was rich in varied animal life, shore, plain and upland varieties of game. The continental areas, aside from the desert sections were thickly forested. There was no sign of intelligent life on land or sea. Still, Ben kept the phase ship in orbit a week and a half, checking and rechecking before giving permission to land.

  “All right,” he said at last to Coop, standing in the Control Section, “prepare to shift to surface below.”

  “Prepare to shift,” echoed Coop. The ritual was repeated, the ship shifted.

  One moment it was out in space and the next it was on the ground. Local gravity took over from the phase oscillation of the ship itself. It was a slightly less gravity than that of Earth, and the lightness of body Ben suddenly felt, with the rest, was an inescapable invitation to a lightness of spirit.

  He looked into the screen.

  The spot that had been picked was a small, natural phase ship’s parking area. It was a tiny valley on a plateau, held between steep rock walls eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in height. The floor of the valley was relatively smooth and carpeted with a sparse growth of something very like grass, between large, whitish boulders, evidently split off and tumbled from the surrounding cliffs.

  In the floor of the valley, there were no trees. It was

  like some ancient dry riverbed scoured down to the rock.Only on the rock walls and on top of them were a few gnarly, small tree-like specimens of vegetation to be seen.The valley down which Ben looked on the screen was silent and still.

  —Then, suddenly there was movement.

  A flicker of movement at the far end of the valley floor, becoming suddenly a small object hurtling along the ground toward the ship. It came at an incredible speed, and as it flashed into near view Ben saw it was a small device of metal about as large as a child’s wagon and floating barely inches above the ground. It shot forward, swerved to its right, and described a circle around the ship, abruptly laying behind it a wide track of yellow coloring.

  It completed its circle, swung back, and approached one of the large boulders just inside the line. It nosed against the boulder and for a moment nothing happened—and then the six foot high chunk of rock moved. It teetered and rolled ponderously across the yellow line, out of the circle.

  Immediately there was a wink of incredible light on top of the rock wall to Ben’s right. In the same split-second there was a crack of noise loud enough to be heard inside the phase ship, and where the boulder had been was only a cloud of rising dust.

  The metal device took suddenly to the air and flew back and forth, looping from the yellow line on the ground on one side of the phase ship to the yellow line on the other side.

  When it was done, a hoop-shaped pattern of golden lines in the air above enclosed the phase ship like a cage placed over it.

  “Take her up?” said Coop, urgently in Ben’s ear. Ben, turning to look at him, saw the younger man’s face pale and staring.

  “No,” said Ben, steadily, looking back at the screen. “I don’t think we’d be allowed to make it.”

  Chapter 8

  He was by no means certain of that—that whoever or whatever had reacted to the phase ship’s landing could stop them from shifting off-planet and escaping—thought Ben several hours later in the privacy of his office, where he had retreated to think the situation through. He could not imagine how their unseen captors could know that they were going to phase shift, or inhibit the shift once it was triggered. But the fact that the s
hip’s landing at this remote and apparently deserted spot should find defenses immediately ready and waiting for them was enough to make him cautious about testing the further powers to be found on this world.

  The important thing was that Coop had accepted without argument Ben’s apparent certainty that it would not be safe to try and lift the ship. By so much had all these past weeks of Ben’s efforts to make himself independent and unquestionable in authority paid off. If the worst came to the worst, they could still try a shift off-planet. But meanwhile, Ben had the satisfaction of knowing the crew would obey him and follow his lead.

  Already in the past four hours, they had cautiously explored the situation. Chemical tests run on the local atmosphere had proved it eminently safe and breathable. Heat radar pictures taken by Observation had established the existence of metal devices about as large as a small military tank just out of sight on the cliff above them at four points surrounding them. And by each metal device had been heat images that moved about and had about the same characteristics as the body heats human beings would show. Finally, a volunteer—Kirk Walish—had left the ship and walked around inside the yellow line on the ground,breathing the native atmosphere, and come back aboard unharmed.

  The next move was undoubtedly up to their captors. That there would be a next move, Ben did not doubt. The fact that the cliff top weapons had not simply blasted the phase ship without warning meant that their captors could not be completely sure of their superiority over whoever might be inside the ship. The natives—whoever they were—had taken the initiative. Aboard the space ship the humans had stood pat, refusing to be drawn into any retaliatory action. It was like a game of chess in the opening moves between two players who had never played each other before—both sides wanted to gain as much information about the opponent as possible, and give up as little as possible about themselves. The next move now was up to the phase ship’s captors.

  The very fact, thought Ben, feeling his mental machinery warming to the problem facing it, that their captors had hesitated was in itself a betrayal of information about them. Their characters must be such. . .

  The intercom on his desk came alive to interrupt his thoughts.

  “Sir? Coop speaking. Observation has two upright, two-legged individuals coming in fast.”

  Ben reached out and pushed down the key on the intercom.

  “How?” he demanded. “Coming in, how?”

  “On one of the same sort of things that marked out the yellow lines.”

  The thought of the yellow lines struck a sudden spark in Ben’s mind.

  “Have Captain Bone meet me at the airlock,” he said into the intercom. “I’ll go out to meet whoever it is that’s coming as soon as they get here.”

  “Yes sir—” There was perhaps a small note of surprise in Coop’s voice over the intercom. He would not have thought ahead and foreseen, as Ben had done, that the next move in the present situation had to be some sort of interview between captors and captured.

  Walt was already at the lock when Ben got there, and he had the TV screen in the lock room switched on. In it, Ben could see two slim, gray-furred creatures standing patiently just beyond the yellow line on the ground with thel ong narrow stretch of the dry valley behind them.

  “I expected this,” Ben said to Walt A stray observation intruded to distract him momentarily. For the first time,in all the years Ben had known him, Walt was unshaven.It was not a startling unshavenness, but the close stubble darkened Walt’s chin and jaw, giving him a grim look. “I want you to go out with me,” Ben went on, “to meet them. But there’s something else. I want you to get Observation busy, and anyone else who might be able to help, at figuring out what those yellow lines, on the ground and in the air, are made of, and if it’s the same thing in both cases.”

  “Yes,” said Walt, as evenly as ever. “I’ll see to it.”

  “Come on, then,” said Ben. He reached out to press the control activating the airlock. It opened and they went outside.

  Outside, he walked forward to the line, with Walt beside him, and stopped. Only a couple of feet beyond stood the two gray-furred beings. They were scarcely more than five feet tall, Ben observed, slightly boned, with four-fingered

  hands having each a single, powerful, opposable thumb almost as long as the fingers. The inner surface, of the hands and some small circles of dark flesh around the eyes were the only unfurred areas of their bodies. They were almost neckless, and their round, dish-shaped faces had a straight, nearly lipless mouth and a rudimentary, barely projecting nose with small, triple, horizontal nostrils that squeezed themselves shut as he and Walt approached. Above the nose, two round, dark-cornered eyes, with yellow “whites” and both upper and lower eyelids, looked at the humans with no expression that Ben could discover.

  Ben and Walt stood on their side of the yellow line.

  “Hello,” said Ben dryly, to the alien faces.

  As if the word had been a signal, the one on the left turned, bent down and took what looked like a black rod from the sled-like device beside him. He pushed the rod into the earth and he and the other backed off. Immediately, above the rod, the air fogged and appeared to resolve itself into a three-dimensional image. As Ben watched, he saw the phase ship imaged, saw the airlock door open, the figures of himself and Walt step out, walk up to the yellow line, and stop. He saw the rod driven into the ground. Then the imaged figures stopped moving.

  Ben looked at the Gray-furs and saw them looking back at him. The two dish-shaped faces turned to face once more toward the pictured scene, and Ben turned with them.

  The figures shown there began to move again. One of the imaged Gray-furs stepped forward and passed a small object held in his hand above the yellow line. The line vanished for a space of about three feet. The image of Ben stepped through and the Gray-fur waved the line back into existence behind him. The image of Ben and both Gray-furs stepped onto the sled, which carried them rapidly down the valley through a blur of motion and distance,and finally under huge trees and between white-sided structures. They were carried finally into a structure, where they got off. The image of Ben was met by four other Gray-furs. Another image maker was set up but the images it showed were out of focus to the real Ben watching from inside the yellow line. Then the imaged Ben and the two Gray-fur images remounted the sled and returned to the ship, letting Ben pass once more within the yellow line.

  “All right,” said Ben.

  He turned to Walt.

  “They want you to go with them, that’s plain enough,” said Walt. There was a strange look to the unshaven face.

  “Maybe we better talk it over in conference back on the ship.”

  “No,” said Ben. “It’s our move. We aren’t going to learn any more unless I go with them.” He looked intently at Walt. “You’ll be in charge while I’m gone.”

  “If you don’t come back—” Walt’s tone was expressionless.

  “Whether I come back or not,” said Ben, “if, in your opinion, the safety of the ship is threatened, you can try to lift out of here. If you do that, it’ll be up to you to see that the ship goes on and does what it was sent out to do. You’ll find the combination to my office walk-in safe in the office filing cabinet under ‘S’. In the filing cabinet inside the safe, under ‘P,’ you’ll find a file folder of secret papers, including the full original order that sent us out here, and two orders I’ve written out, one appointing you commanding officer aboard the ship in my place, one appointing Lee. Destroy Lee’s appointment and enter your appointment in the official ship’s log. —Is that all clear?”

  “Clear,” said Walt, inclining his head slightly.

  “All right, then.” Ben turned back to the Gray-furs and saw a gap had already been made in the yellow line. He stepped through. One Gray-fur turned and stepped over to take the image-producing rod out of the ground.

  Ben turned abruptly back to the yellow line, which had been closed up again.

  “What is it?” asked Walt,
on the other side.

  “I want them to leave that there,” said Ben. “If I’m right, it can give you a picture of everything that’ll happen to me while I’m with them.” The thought of this had come like an inspiration. Another inspiration followed hard behind it. “Walt,” he added “have Observation film everything that’s shown by this gadget. I want it filmed for detail, so we can study it closely, later.”

  “What do you want me to do now?” asked Walt.

  “I’m going to turn and walk away a few steps down the valley,” said Ben. “Don’t watch me. Watch where that rod was, as if you expected to see what I’m doing shown there. If they’re as bright as all this indicates, they’ll get the idea.”

  He turned. Both Gray-furs were watching him. The one who had picked up the rod, still held it loosely. Ben walked off a few steps and stopped, hesitated a second, then turned around and came back. The Gray-furs were no longer looking at him, but at each other. The one with the rod drove it into the ground. An image of Ben appeared in the air above it.

  Ben moved experimentally. The image of himself matched the movement.

  “All right,” said Ben. He turned and stepped up onto the small surface of the sled-like device. A Gray-fur stepped up in front of him, and another stepped up behind him.

  “Good luck—” he heard Walt start to say . . . and then they were moving at steadily increasing, blurring speed down the valley just above the surface of the ground.

  The wind seemed to part around them as they went. There was nothing to disturb their precarious-seeming upright stand on the tiny surface of the sled. Almost immediately they were emerging from the far end of the valley. They swooped down an almost perpendicular slope at a horizontal angle to the steeply inclined earth, and plunged beneath the shadow of green-topped, tree-like plants that towered above them. And suddenly they were among tool-made constructions—buildings with curving walls and domed roofs and arched entrances, all in a soft smoothly gleaming white.