Chapter III

_The unfamiliar, you say, is the unseen, the completely new and
strange? Not so. The epitome of the unfamiliar is the familiar
inverted, the familiar turned on its head. View a familiar place
under new conditions--a deserted and darkened theater, an empty
night club by day--and you will find yourself more influenced by
the emotion of strangeness than by any number of unseen places.
Go back to your old neighborhood and find everything changed.
Come into your own home when everyone is gone, when the lights
are out and the furniture rearranged--there I will show you the
strange and frightening ghosts that are the shapes left over
when reality superimposes itself upon the images of memory. The
goblins lurk in the shadows of your own room... _
Owen Miller
Essays on Night and the Unfamiliar

For one heart-stopping moment the darkness had seemed to swoop in upon them like the clutching hand of death. Instinctively they had huddled together in the center of the room. But when the second look, and the third, gave them reassurance that the effect was really there, though the cause was still a mystery, then half the mystery was gone, and they began to drift apart. Each felt on trial, and held tight to himself and the picture of himself he empathized in the others’ eyes.

The Captain said quietly, “It’s just ... there. It doesn’t seem to be spreading.”

Hoskins gazed at it critically. “About half a meter deep,” he murmured. “What do you suppose it’s made of?”

“Not a gas,” said Paresi. “It has a--a sort of surface.”

Ives, who had frozen to the spot when first he saw the blackness on his way to the port, took another two steps. The hand which had been half lifted to touch the control continued upward relievedly, as if glad to have a continuous function even though its purpose had changed.

“Don’t touch it!” rapped the Captain.

Ives turned his head to look at the Captain, then faltered and let the hand drop. “Why not?”

“Certainly not a liquid,” Paresi mused, as if there had been no interruption. “And if it’s a solid, where did that much matter come from? Through the hull?”

Hoskins, who knew the hull, how it was made, how fitted, how treated once it was in place, snorted at the idea.

“If it was a gas,” said Paresi, “there’d be diffusion. And convection. If it were poisonous, we’d all be dead. If not, the chances are we’d smell it. And the counter’s not saying a thing--so it’s not radioactive.”

“You trust the counter?” asked Ives bitterly.

“I trust it,” said Paresi. His near-whisper shook with what sounded like passion. “A man must have faith in something. I hold that faith in every single function of every part of this ship until each and every part is separately and distinctly proved unworthy of faith!”

“Then, by God, you’ll understand my faith in my own two hands and what they feel,” snarled Ives. He stepped to the bulkhead and brought his meaty hand hard against it.

“Touché,” murmured Hoskins, and meant either Ives’ remark or the flat, solid smack of the hand against the blackness.

In his sleep, Johnny uttered a high, soft, careless tinkle of youthful, happy laughter.

“Somebody’s happy,” said Ives.

“Paresi,” said the Captain, “what happens when he wakes up?”

Paresi’s eyebrows shrugged for him. “Practically anything. He’s reached down inside himself, somewhere, and found a way out. For him--not for any of the rest of us. Maybe he’ll ignore what we see. Maybe he’ll think he’s somewhere else, or in some other time. Maybe he’ll be someone else. Maybe he won’t wake up at all.”

“Maybe he has the right idea,” said Ives.

“That’s the second time you’ve made a crack like that,” said Paresi levelly. “Don’t do it again. You can’t afford it.”

“We can’t afford it,” the Captain put in.

“All right,” said Ives, with such docility that Paresi shot him a startled, suspicious glance. The big communications man went to his station and sat, half-turned away from the rest.

“What are they after?” complained the Captain suddenly. “What do they want?”

“Who?” asked Paresi, still watching Ives.

Hoskins explained, “Whoever it was who said ‘Welcome to our planet.’”

Ives turned toward them, and Paresi’s relief was noticeable. Ives said, “They want us dead.”

“Do they?” asked the Captain.

“They don’t want us to leave the ship, and they don’t want the ship to leave the planet.”

“Then it’s the ship they want.”

“Yeah,” amended Ives, “without us.”

Paresi said, “You can’t conclude that, Ives. They’ve inconvenienced us. They’ve turned us in on ourselves, and put a drain on our intangible resources as men and as a crew. But so far they haven’t actually done anything to us. We’ve done it to ourselves.”

Ives looked at him scornfully. “We wrecked the unwreckable controls, manufactured that case-hardened darkness, and talked to ourselves on an all-wave carrier with no source, about information no outsider could get?”

“I didn’t say any of that.” Paresi paused to choose words. “Of course they’re responsible for these phenomena. But the phenomena haven’t hurt us. Our reactions to the phenomena are what has done the damage.”

“A fall never hurt anyone, they told me when I was a kid,” said Ives pugnaciously. “It’s the sudden stop.”

Paresi dismissed the remark with a shrug. “I still say that while we have been astonished, frightened, puzzled and frustrated, we have not been seriously threatened. Our water and food and air are virtually unlimited. Our ability to live with one another under emergency situations has been tested to a fare-thee-well, and all we have to do is recognize the emergency as such and that ability will rise to optimum.” He smiled suddenly. “It could be worse, Ives.”

“I suppose it could,” said Ives. “That blackness could move in until it really crowded us, or--”

Very quietly Hoskins said, “It is moving in.”

Captain Anderson shook his head. “No...” And hearing him, they slowly recognized that the syllable was not a denial, but an exclamation. For the darkness was no longer a half-meter deep on the bulkhead. No one had noticed it, but they suddenly became aware that the almost-square cabin was now definitely rectangular, with the familiar controls, the communications wall, and the thwartship partition aft of them forming three sides to the encroaching fourth.

[Illustration: Nude woman on chess motif.]

Ives rose shaking and round-eyed from his chair. He made an unspellable animal sound and rushed at the blackness. Paresi leaped for him, but not fast enough. Ives collided sickeningly against the strange jet surface and fell. He fell massively, gracelessly, not prone but on wide-spread knees, with his arms crumpled beneath him and the side of his face on the deck. He stayed there, quite unconscious, a gross caricature of worship.