Chapter 7

In the beginning there was nothing at all, and then things were created, and the wonder of created things was very great. When men became, they marveled at the richness and the beauty about them, and their lives were filled with astonishment at the myriads of things in the air and on the earth and in the sea. For many centuries they were busy taking note of all the created things that were. They forgot that there was such a condition as emptiness.

But there were six people in a certain solar system who really knew what emptiness amounted to. Five of them were in a fortress which was an asteroid and a mystery. One was in a small, crude object which floated steadily out from Earth. This one’s name was Nikolai. The rest of it does not matter. He had been born in a small village in the Urals, and as a little boy he played games with mud and reeds and sticks and dogs and other little boys. As a growing youth he dutifully stuffed his head with things out of books, and some seemed to him rational and marvelous, and some did not make much sense but were believed by everybody. And who was he to go against the wise comrades who ran the government and protected the people from wars and famines and the schemes of villainous capitalists?

As a young man he was considered promising. If he had been interested in such matters, he might have had a moderately successful career in politics, as politics was practised in his nation. But he liked things. Real things.

When he was a student in the university he kept a canary in his lodgings. He loved it very much. There was a girl, too, about whom he dreamed splendidly. But there was a need for school teachers in Bessarabia, and she went there to teach. She wept when she left him. After that Nikolai studied with something of desperation, trying to forget her because he could not have her.

He thought of such past events as he drifted outward from Earth. He was the passenger, he was the crew of the manned space-probe his government had prepared to go out and investigate strange signals coming from emptiness. He was a volunteer, of course. It was a great honor to be accepted, and for a while he’d almost forgotten the girl who was teaching school in Bessarabia. But that was a long time ago, now. At first he’d liked to remember the take-off, when brisk, matter-of-fact men tucked him in his acceleration-chair and left him, and he lay staring upward in dead silence--save for the ticking of an insanely emotionless clock--until there was a roar to end all roars and a shock to crush anything made of flesh and bones, and then a terrible, horrible feeling of weight that kept on and on until he lost consciousness.

He could remember all this, if he chose. He had a distinct recollection of coming back to life, and of struggling to send off the signal which would say that he had survived the take-off. There were telemetering devices which reported what information was desired about the bands and belts of deadly radiation which surrounded the planet Earth. But Nikolai reported by voice, because that was evidence that he had passed through those murderous places unharmed. And his probe went on and on outward, away from the Earth and the sun.

He received messages from Earth. Tinny voices assured him that his launching had gone well. His nation was proud of him. Enormous rewards awaited him on his return. Meanwhile--The tinny voices instructed him in what he was to say for them to record and broadcast to all the world in his honor.

He said it, with the Earth a small crescent-shaped bit of brightness behind him. He drifted on. The crescent which was Earth grew smaller and smaller as days went by. He took due care of the instruments of his space-vehicle. He made sure that the air apparatus behaved properly. He disposed of wastes. From time to time he reported, by voice, information which automatic devices had long since given in greater detail and with superior accuracy.

And he thought more and more about the girl--teaching school in Bessarabia--and his canary, which had died. Days went by. He was informed that it was time for him to make contact with a drone fuel-rocket sent on before him. He watched the instruments which would point out where it was.

He found it, and with small auxiliary rockets he made careful tiny blastings which guided his vehicle to contact with it. The complex machinery for refueling took effect. Presently he cast off the emptied drone, aimed very, very carefully and blasted outward once more. The shock was worse than that on Earth, and he knew nothing for a long, long time. He was horribly weak when he regained consciousness. He mentioned it in his reports. There was no comment on the fact in the replies he received from Earth.

He continued to float away from the sun. It became impossible to pick out Earth among the stars. The sun was smaller than he remembered. There was nothing to be seen anywhere but stars and more stars and the dwindling disk of the sun that used to rise and set but now remained stationary, shrinking.

So Nikolai came to know emptiness. There were points of light which were stars. They were illimitable distances away. In between was emptiness. He had no sensation of movement. Save that as days went by the sun grew smaller, there was no change in anything. All was emptiness. If his vehicle floated like this for ten thousand times ten thousand years, the stars would appear no nearer. If he got out and ran upon nothingness to get back to where he could see Earth again, he would have to run for centuries, and generations would die and nations fall before he caught the least glimmer of that thin crescent which was his home.

If he shouted, no man would ever hear, because emptiness does not carry sound. If he died, there was no earth into which his body could be lowered. If he lived, there was nowhere he could stand upright and breathe clean air and feel solidity beneath his feet. He had a destination, to be sure, but he did not really believe that he would ever reach it, nor did he imagine he would ever return. Now he dismissed it from his thoughts.

He found that he was feverish, and he mentioned it when the tinny voices talked urgently to him. He guessed, without emotion, that he had not passed through the deadly radiation-belts around Earth unburned. He had been assured that he would pass through them so swiftly that they would be quite harmless. Now he knew that this was a mistake. His body obeyed him only sluggishly. He was dying of deep-seated radiation burns. But he felt nothing.

Voices waked him to insist that he make contact with another fuel-drone. He exhausted himself as he dutifully obeyed commands. He was clumsy. He was feeble. But he managed a second refueling. And even as he performed the highly technical operation with seemingly detached and reluctant hands, he thought of a schoolteacher in Bessarabia.

Before he fired the new fuel which would send him onward at what would be more than escape velocity, he almost humorously--yet quite humorlessly--reviewed his life. He considered that he might have no later opportunity to do so. There were three things he had done which no man had done before him. He had loved a certain small canary, and he remembered it distinctly. He had loved a certain girl, and in his weakened and dying state he could see her much more clearly than the grubby interior of the space-probe. And the third thing--

He had to cast about in his mind to remember what it was. His hand poised upon the rocket-firing key, he debated. Ah, yes! The third thing was that he had learned what emptiness was.

He pressed the firing-key. And the space-probe spouted flames and went on. Before the fuel was exhausted it had reached a velocity so great that it would go on forever through interstellar space. It would never fall back toward the sun, not even after thousands of years.

The knowledge of emptiness possessed by the five in the asteroid was different. A totally empty room is intimidating. A vacant house is depressing. The two-mile-long asteroid, honeycombed with tunnels and corridors and galleries and rooms, was like a deserted city. Those who had left it had carefully stripped it of personal possessions, but they’d left weapons behind, ready to be manned and used. They’d left a warning device to call them. The recall device was proof that the danger had not been destroyed and might return. And the plaintive call through all the solar system proved that it was returning.

There was irony in the fact that Earth had panicked when it seemed that intelligent non-human beings signaled from space, and that shrill disputes for advantage began instantly Burke reported no living monsters at the signals’ source. The fortress and its call meant more than the mere existence of aliens. It was proof that there were entities of space who needed to be fought. It proved the existence of fighting ships of space; of deadly war in emptiness; of creatures who crossed the void between star systems to conquer and to murder and destroy.

And such creatures were coming.

Burke ground his teeth. Earth had fusion bombs and rockets which could carry them for pitifully short distances on the cosmic scale. This fortress was incomparably more powerful than all of Earth’s armament put together. A fleet which dared to attack it must feel itself stronger still. What could Earth do against a fleet which dared attack this asteroid?

And what could he and Holmes and Keller do against such a fleet, even with the fortress, when they did not yet understand a single one of its weapons?

Burke worked himself to exhaustion, trying to unravel even the simplest principles of the fortress’ armament. There were globes which were, obviously, the long-range weapons of the garrison. They were stored in a launching-tube at the far back of the compartment. But Keller could not unravel the method of their control. There was no written matter in the fortress. None. A totally unknown language and an unfamiliar alphabet would prevent written matter from being useful, ordinarily, but in technical descriptions there are bound to be diagrams. Burke felt desperately that in even the most meaningless of scripts there would be diagrams which could be puzzled out. But there was nothing. The builders of the fortress could have been illiterate, for all the signs of writing that they’d left.

Keller continued to labor valiantly. But there was no clue to the operation of anything but the transmitter. That was understandable because one knew where the message went in, and where it came out for broadcast. With the apparatus before one, one could deduce how it operated. But no one could guess how weapons were controlled when he hadn’t the least idea of what they did.

On the third night in the asteroid--the third night by ship-time, since there was neither day nor night in the great empty corridors of the fortress--Burke dreamed his dream again. It was perfectly familiar, from the trees with their trailing leaves, to the markings on the larger moon. He felt the anguished anxiety he’d so often known before. He grasped the hand-weapon and knew that he was ready to fight anything imaginable for the person he feared for. He heard small fluting sounds behind him, and then he knew that someone ran breathlessly behind the swaying foliage just ahead. He felt such relief and exultation that his heart seemed about to burst. He gave a great shout and bounded to meet her--

He waked in the small ship in the entrance tunnel. All was silent. All was still. The lights in the control-compartment of the ship were turned to dim. There was no sound anywhere. The opened air-lock doors, both inner and outer, let in a fan-shaped streak of brightness which lay on the floor.

Burke lay quiet, still wrought up by the vivid emotions of the dream.

He heard a stirring in the compartment below, occupied by Sandy and Pam. Someone came very quietly up the ladder-like stairway. Burke blinked in the semi-darkness. He saw that it was Sandy. She crossed the compartment to the air-lock. Very quietly, she closed the outer door and then the inner. She fastened them.

Burke said, sitting up, “Why’d you do that, Sandy?”

She started violently, and turned.

“Pam can’t sleep,” she said in a low tone. “She says the fortress is creepy. She feels that there’s something hiding in it, something deadly and frightening. When you leave the air-lock open, she’s afraid. So I closed it.”

“Holmes and Keller are out,” said Burke. “Keller’s trying to trace down power-leads from the instrument-room to whatever power-source warms and lights everything. We can’t lock him out.”

Sandy obediently opened the air-lock doors again. She turned toward the ladder leading downward.

“Sandy,” said Burke unhappily, “I know I’m acting like a fool.”

“You’re doing all right,” said Sandy. She paused at the top of the ladder. “Finding this--” she waved her hand about her--”ought to put your name in the history books. Of course you’ll be much disliked by people who intended to invent space travel themselves. But you’re doing all right.”

“I’m not thinking of that,” said Burke. “I’m thinking of you. I was going to ask you to marry me. I didn’t. If we live through this, will you?”

Sandy regarded him carefully in the dim light of the ship’s interior, most of which came through the air-lock doors.

“There are some conditions,” she said evenly. “I won’t play second fiddle to an imaginary somebody behind a veil of dreamed-of leaves. I don’t want to make conditions, Joe. But I couldn’t stand your feeling that maybe in marrying me you’d give up your chance of finding her--whatever or whoever she is.”

“But I wouldn’t feel that way!” protested Burke.

“I’d believe you did,” said Sandy. “And it would amount to the same thing. I think I made a mistake in coming along in the ship, Joe. If I weren’t along you might have missed me. You might even--” she grimaced--”you might even have dreamed about me. But here I am. And I can’t compete with somebody in a dream. I won’t even try. I--I can’t imagine marrying anybody else, but if I do get married I want to be the only girl my guy dreams about!”

She turned again to the ladder. Then said abruptly, “You didn’t ask why Pam feels creepy, or where. There’s a place up on the second gallery where there’s a door that’s still locked. Pam gets the shivers when she goes by it. I don’t. The whole place is creepy, to me.”

She went down the ladder. Minutes later Holmes and Keller arrived.

Holmes said curtly, “The machinery in the transmitter-room reached a change-point just now. Those red dots in that plastic plate apparently started the transmitter in the first place. When its calls were answered it changed the broadcast, adding a directional signal. Just before we started out from Earth the red sparks passed another place and changed the broadcast again. Now they’ve passed a third place. We were there when the machinery shifted all around on a signal from that thing which hovers close to the red sparks and watches them. The transmitter probably blasted out at four or five times its original volume. There must have been a hundred thousand kilowatts in it, at least. It looks serious. Whatever those red sparks represent must be close.”