‘I didn’t think I’d ever make it back into here, Billy. I’m sorry if I went a bit –’
Quickly, Dominguey said, ‘Yes, it’s good to be back in the ship. With the artificial ½G being maintained in here, and the shutters down, this dump seems less like a cast-off version of hell, doesn’t it?’ He took Baron’s arm and led him to a chair. Sharn watched curiously; he had not seen the stolid and unimaginative Baron so wild-eyed before.
‘But the weight business,’ Baron was saying. ‘I thought – well, I don’t know what I thought. There’s no rational way of putting it. I thought my body was disintegrating. I –’
‘Jim, you’re over-excited,’ Dominguey said harshly. ‘Keep quiet or get yourself a sedative.’ He turned to the other two men. ‘I want you two to get outside right away. There’s nothing there that can possibly harm you; we’re down on a minor planet, by the looks of things. But before we can evaluate the situation, I want you to be properly aware of what the situation is – as soon as possible.’
‘Did you establish the spectroscope? Did you get any readings?’ Sharn asked. He was not keen to go outside.
‘They’re still out there. Get your suit on, Eddy, and you, Ike, and go and look at them. Jim and I will get a bite to eat. We set the instruments up and we left ’em out there on the rock, pointing at Big Bertha, but they don’t give any readings. Not any readings that make sense.’
‘For God’s sake, you must have got something. We checked all the gear before you carted it outside.’
‘If you don’t believe us, you get out there and have a goddamned good look for yourself, Sharn,’ Baron said.
‘Don’t shout at me, Baron.’
‘Well, take that sick look off your face. Billy and me have done our stint – now you two get outside as Billy says. Take a walk around as we did. Take your time. We’ve got plenty till the drive is mended.’
Malravin said, ‘I’d prefer to get on straightening out the coil. No point for me to go out there. My job is in the ship.’
‘I’m not going out there alone, Ike, so don’t try to worm out of it,’ Sharn said. ‘We agreed that we should go out there when these two came back.’
‘If we came back, conquering heroes that we are,’ Dominguey corrected. ‘You might have had a meal ready to celebrate our return, Eddy.’
‘We’re on half rations, if you remember.’
‘I try never to remember a nasty fact like that,’ Dominguey said good-humouredly.
A preoccupation with food signifies a childish nature, Eddy thought. He must write it down later.
After more quarrelling, Sharn and Malravin climbed into their suits and headed for the hatch. They knew roughly what they would see outside – they had seen enough from the ship’s ports before they had agreed to close down all the shutters – but to view it from outside was psychologically a very different matter.
‘One thing,’ Baron called to them. ‘Watch out for the atmosphere. It has a way of wandering.’
‘There can’t be an atmosphere on a planetoid this size!’ Sharn protested.
Baron came up to him and peeped through the helmet at him. His cheeks were still hectically flushed, his eyes wild.
‘Look, clever dick, get this into your head. We’ve arrived up in some ghastly hole in the universe where the ordinary physical laws don’t apply. This place can’t exist and Big Bertha can’t exist. Yet they do. You’re very fond of paradoxes – well, now one has gobbled you up. Just get out there quickly, and you won’t come back in as cocky as you are now.’
‘You love to blow your mouth off, Baron. It didn’t do you much good out there. I thought you were going to die of fright just now.’
Dominguey said urgently, ‘Hey, you two sweet little fellows, stop bitching. I warn you, Eddy, Jim is right. You’ll see when you get outside that in this bit of heaven the universe is horribly out of joint.’
‘So will someone’s nose be,’ Sharn promised.
He tramped into the hatch with Malravin. The burly Siberian thumbed the sunken toggle switches on the panel, and the air lock sank to ground level, its atmosphere exhausting as it went.
They unsealed the door and stepped out onto the rough surface of the planetoid Captain Dominguey had christened Erewhon. They stood with the doughnut shape of the Wilson on stilts behind them and tried to adjust to the prospect. If anything, they seemed to weigh slightly more than they had in. the ship’s artificially maintained ½G field, although the bulk of their suits made this hard to tell.
At first it was difficult to see anything; it was always to remain difficult to see anything well.
They stood on a tiny plain. The distance of the horizon was impossible to judge in the weird light. It seemed never more than a hundred yards away in any direction. It was distorted; this seemed to be because the plain was irregular. High banks, broken hollows, jagged lips of rock, formed the landscape, the features running higgledy-piggledy in a way that baffled sense. There was no sign of the atmosphere Baron had mentioned; the stars came down to the skyline and were sharply occulted by it.
With the hand claws of their suits touching, the two men began to walk forward. They could see Baron’s instruments standing deserted a short way off, and instinctively moved towards them. There was no need for lights; the entire bowl of the sky was awash with stars.
The Wilson was a deep penetration cartographic ship. With two sister ships, it was the first such vessel to venture into the heart of the Crab Nebula. There, weaving its way among the endless abysses of interstellar dust, it lost contact with the Brinkdale and the Grandon. The curtains of uncreated matter closed in on them, baffling even the subradio.
They went on. As they went, the concepts of space they had once held were erased. This was a domain of light and matter, not of emptiness and dark. All about them were coils of smoke – smoke set with sequins! – and cliffs of shimmering dust the surface of which they could not have explored in two lifetimes. To begin with the four men were elated at the sheer magnificence of the new environment. Later, the magnificence seemed not of beauty but of annihilation. It was too big, they were too insignificant. The four men retreated into silence.
But the ship continued on its course, for they had their orders and their honour, and their pay. According to plan, the Wilson sank into the heart of the nebula. The instrumentation had developed an increasing fault until it became folly to go farther, but fortunately they had then come to a region less tightly packed with stars and star matter. Beyond that was space, light years across, entirely free of physical bodies – except one.
They found soon enough that it was no stroke of fortune to be here. Swilling in the middle of the gigantic hole in space was the phenomenon they christened Big Bertha.
It was too big. It was impossible. But the instruments ceased to be reliable; without instruments, human senses were useless in such a region. Already bemused by travel, they were ill-equipped to deal with Big Bertha. To add to their troubles, the directional cyboscope that governed the jets in the ship’s equator broke down and became unreliable.
They took the only course open to them: they landed on the nearest possible body, to rest there while they did a repair job and re-established contact with their sister ships. The nearest possible body happened to be Erewhon.
Touchdown on Erewhon had been a little miracle, accomplished with few other instruments than human eyes, human hands, and a string of human blasphemies. The hammer of static radiated by Big Bertha rendered radio, radar, and radix all ineffective.
Now the sky was a wonder painful to view. Everywhere were the glittering points of stars, everywhere the immense