Some of the drive casing was off. Malravin’s feet protruded from the cluttered cavity. He was in there with an arc lamp, still patiently working on the directional cyboscope.
The other three sat round in bucket seats, talking. Sharn had changed his clothes, towelled himself down, and had a hot cup of Stimulous. Baron and the captain smoked mescahales.
‘We’ve established that Erewhon’s period of rotation is two hours, five minutes odd,’ Dominguey told Sharn. ‘That gives us about an hour of night when the ship is shielded from Big Bertha by the bulk of the planetoid. Sunset of the night after next will fall just before twenty hours, Galactic Mean. At twenty hours, all governmental ships keep open-listed for distress signals. Shielded from Bertha’s noise, we stand our best chance of contacting the Grandon and the Brinkdale then. There’s hope for us yet!’
Sharn nodded, Baron said, ‘You’re too much the optimist, Billy. Nobody can ever get to rescue us.’ He spoke in an amused, confident tone.
‘How’s that again?’
‘I said nobody can ever reach us, man. Consider it like this, man. We left ordinary space behind when we started burying into the nebula to get here. This little spot involves a number of paradoxes, doesn’t it? I mean, we agree that there’s nowhere else like this place in the universe, don’t we?’
‘No we don’t,’ Dominguey said. ‘We agree that in less than eleven hundred years of galactic exploration we have covered only a small section of one arm of one galaxy. We don’t know enough as yet to be capable of labelling an unusual situation paradoxical. Though I’ll agree it’s a poor spot for a picnic. Now, you were saying?’
‘Don’t try and be funny, Billy. This is not the place for humour – not even graveyard humour.’ Baron smiled as if the remark had a significance only he knew. He gestured with one hand, gracefully. ‘We are in a place that cannot possibly exist. That monstrous thing up in space cannot be a sun or any known body, or we would have got a spectroscopic reading from it. It cannot be a dead sun, or we would not see it as we do. This planetoid cannot be a planetoid, for in reality it would be so near Bertha it would be swept into it by irresistible gravitational forces. You were right to call it Erewhon. That’s what it is – Nowhere.’
Sharn spoke. ‘You’re playing with Malravin’s silly theory, Baron. You’re pretending we are in a nightmare. Let me assure you such assumptions are based entirely on withdrawal –’
‘I don’t want to hear!’ Baron said. The smile on his lips became gentler. ‘You wouldn’t understand, Sharn. You are so clever you prefer to tell me what I think rather than hear what I think. But I’m going to tell you what I think. I don’t think we are undergoing a nightmare. I think we are dead.’
Sharn rose, and began pacing behind his seat.
‘Dominguey, you don’t think this?’
‘I don’t feel dead.’
‘Good. Keep feeling that way or we’re going to be in trouble. You know what the matter is with Baron. He’s a weak character. He has always supported himself with science and the methods of science – we’ve had nothing but a diet of facts from him for the last thousand light years. Now he thinks science has failed him. There’s nothing else left. He can no longer face the physical world. So, he comes to this emotional conclusion that he is dead. Classic withdrawal symptoms.’
Dominguey said, ‘Someone ought to kick your ass, Eddy Sharn. Of all the glib and conceited idiots I ever met. … At least Jim has come out with an idea. It’s not so far-fetched at that, when you consider we know nothing about what happens after death. Think about it a bit, think about the first few moments of death. Try to visualise the period after heart action has ceased, when the body, and particularly the brain inside its skull case, still retains its warmth. What goes on then? Suppose in that period of time everything in the brain drains away into nothing like a bucket of water leaking into sand. Don’t you think some pretty vivid and hallucinatory things would happen inside that head? And, after all, the sort of events happening to us now are typical of the sort that might occur to spacers like us in that dying period. Maybe we ran smack into a big chunk of dead matter on our way into the Crab. Okay, we’re all dead – the strong feeling of helplessness we all have is a token of the fact that we are really strewn over the control cabin with the walls caved in.’
Lazily clapping his hands, Baron said, ‘You put it even better than I could have put it myself, Billy.’
‘Don’t think I believe what I am saying, though,’ Dominguey said grimly. ‘You know me, laddie: ever the funny man, even to death.’
He stood up and confronted Sharn.
‘What I am trying to say, Eddy, is that you are too fond of your own opinions. I know the way your mind works – you’re much happier in any situation if you can make yourself believe that the other people involved are inferior to you. Now then, if you have a theory that helps us tackle this particular section of hell, Jim and I would be pleased to hear it.’
‘Give me a mescahale,’ Sharn said. He had heard such outbursts from the captain before, and attributed them to Dominguey’s being less stable than he liked to pretend he was. Dominguey would be dangerous in a crisis. Not that this was less than a crisis. Sharn accepted the yellow cylinder, activated it, stuck it into his mouth, and sat down. Dominguey sat down beside him, regarding him with interest. They both smoked in silence.
‘Begin then, Eddy. It’s time we took a quick sleep, the lot of us. We’re all exhausted, and it’s beginning to show.’
‘On you maybe, Dominguey.’ He turned to Baron, languidly sunk in his chair.
‘Are you listening, Baron?’
Baron nodded his head.
‘Go ahead. Don’t mind me.’
Things would be so much simpler if one were a robot, Sharn thought. Personalities would not be involved. Any situation has to be situation plus character. It’s bad enough to be burdened with one’s own character; one has to put up with other people’s as well. He pulled out his little notebook to write the thought down, saw Dominguey was eyeing him, and began to speak abruptly.
‘What’s your silly fuss about? We’re here to do a job of observation – why not do it? Before Ike and I went outside, you told us to watch for the atmosphere. I did just that, but from the nonsense you talk about being dead I’d say you were the ones who should have watched it. And this peculiar bodily sensation – you let it rattle you. So did Ike – so did I – but it doesn’t take much knowledge to realise that the horrible sensation as if something were climbing about inside the suit with you has a rational and obvious explanation.’
Baron got up and walked away.
‘Come back when I’m talking, Baron,’ Sharn said, angrily.
‘I’m going to see how Malravin is getting on, then I’m going to bunk down. If you have anything interesting to say, Billy can give it to me in a nutshell later. Your double talk holds nothing for me. I’m tired of your speeches.’
‘Tired? – When you’re dead? Needing to bunk down? – When you’re dead?’
‘Leave him, for God’s sake, and get on with what you were saying,’ Dominguey said with a yawn. ‘Look, Eddy, we’re in a nasty spot here – I don’t just mean stuck on Erewhon, though that’s bad enough. But much more getting on each other’s nerves and there will be murder done. I’d say you were turning into a very good candidate for the axe.’
‘You toying with the idea of murder, Dominguey? I suppose that could be another refuge from the realities of the position.’
‘Knock off that line of talk, Sharn, and that’s an order. You were talking about this strange bodily sensation we felt out on the rock. Don’t be so coy about it. It’s caused by the fact that most of our weight out