Damon Knight - Beyond the Barrier

This might, just might, be the purser’s office, with all the records of the voyage…

But it was not. It was the dispensary.

The wall panels held rack on rack of drugs in cylindrical bottles, each elaborately labeled. Probably most of them were worthless by now. Naismith examined a few, put them back.

He tried another section of the wall.

Inside were gleaming, ranked strips of metal, each labeled with a name and a date. Naismith touched one experimentally, and it tilted out into his hand, a metal-bound sheaf of papers.

It was the case-history of a passenger aboard the ship: the others were the same.

In five minutes the whole story lay under his hands. A virus carried by the green skinned people had mutated; the new form attacked homo sapiens. The symptoms were fever, nausea and intense feelings of anxiety, followed by collapse and coma, then a slow recovery. Death ensued in only a small percentage of cases: but every recovered victim had suffered severe and irreparable brain damage. There were stereo pictures, from which Naismith averted his eyes: vacant faces, dull eyes, jaws hanging….

The epidemic had broken out on the same day the ship left Earth. In the end, it must have been only the greenskins, immune to their own infection, who had been able to bring the ship back and land it safely with its cargo of mindless human beings. All over the Earth, the same tragedy…

Naismith could imagine the shambling aments who had been the luxury ship’s passengers, wandering out onto the plain by ones and twos… out into a land where nothing waited for them but death by exposure arid starvation…

Naismith closed the book slowly and put it back in its place.

He understood now why this was a so-called “dead period.”

Only a handful of immune human beings must have survived, along with the greenskins, to rebuild civilization slowly and painfully over the course of centuries. Yes, that explained many things….

In the morning, both aliens were sullen and heavy-eyed; they spoke to each other in monosyllables, and to Naismith not at all. The child, Yegga, alternately screamed and whined.

After they had breakfasted, Lall and Churan seemed to come sluggishly to life. The woman began to dress in the same short robe she had worn yesterday, saying over her shoulder to Naismith, “Today you will train in the gymnasium there is some equipment there which will prepare you to hunt Zug.”

“I know. I found it there.”

She turned to look at him expressionlessly, then went on with her dressing. “Very well, that will save us time. You saw the Zug, then? What did you think of it?”

“Very impressive, but I don’t see why it was necessary.”

“You are to play the role of a Zug hunter,” she said, fastening the robe around her waist. “If you should see one without preparation, you would betray yourself immediately.”

“I see.” Remembering the vision that had come to him that night in his Beverly Hills apartment, Naismith asked, “And the gun? What was that for?”

She turned with a questioning expression. Churan, who had just entered the lounge carrying the time vehicle, paused to listen. “Gun?” asked Lall.

“Yes, certainly,” Naismith answered with a touch of impatience. “That night, in my bedroom. Tell me, just what would have happened if I had accepted that gun?”

The two aliens looked at each other. Churan opened his mouth to speak, but Lall said sharply, “Be still!” She turned to Naismith, fumbling in the pocket of her robe, and produced a black cylinder. She pushed bowls and plates aside, and rapidly sketched a pistol recognizable as the one Naismith had seen, with its flowing lines and massive grip. Churan came to watch over her shoulder; there was something strained in his silent attention.

“Was it a gun like this?” she asked.

“Yes, of course.”

She turned away indifferently, putting the cylinder back in her pocket. “It would have given you a compulsion to kill Zug,” she said. “Only a precaution.”

Churan was staring at her silently. “Well, are you ready?”

she snapped at him. “Why do we have to wait—why can’t we go?”

Churan shrugged, held up the machine in both hands. He touched the controls; the shadow-egg sprang into being around him. With a last quick glance to left and right, Lall herded the child inside, stood back for Naismith to enter, stepped in herself.

It was more crowded than ever in the shadow-egg, and the scent of the aliens’ bodies was oppressively heavy. By their tense attitudes and their sidelong glances at him, Naismith could tell that his presence made them equally uneasy. Seated on the stool, Churan touched the controls, and they drifted up from the floor, across the lounge and into the corridor.

Once more they followed the red line; blackness swallowed them as they passed through the mound, then they were in dazzling sunlight.

Suddenly, the contrast between the unpleasant closeness of the shadow-egg and that clean brightness outside was more than Naismith could stand.

“Wait,” he said. “I want to get out.”

“What?” Lall and Churan stared at him.

“Set me down there, on top of the mound,” he said, pointing.

“I want to breathe the fresh air for a minute.”

Churan said impatiently, “We have no time to waste—you can breathe where you are.” He put his hands on the controls, but Lall stopped him.

“After all, you want to practice using the ejector,” she muttered. “What harm can it do? Set him down.”

Churan grumbled, but in a moment the shadow-egg swung up along the steep slope, rose to the summit and hovered there, a few inches above the grasstops.

Churan stared down at the machine in his lap, rubbing his squat fingers together and grunting. At last he said, “Miko, move back a little—take the child. Mr. Naismith, you stay where you are.”

The woman and child crowded back beside Churan. Naismith waited tensely. Churan’s fingers touched the controls again, and abruptly Naismith felt himself picked up, swung out away from the aliens. The shadow-egg had bulged out-ward; now it was like two eggs, connected by a narrow tube of shadow. Then, without warning, the bulge vanished. Naismith was falling….

He landed with a jar, arms out for balance. When he looked up, the shadow-egg was drifting off on a long slant down toward the base of the mound.

He stood looking around him, breathing thankfully deep.

The greenish-yellow plain rolled away unbroken to the horizon.

It was early, the sun low in the east, and the thick grasses around his legs were beaded with dew. The sun was warm, but the air had a bracing coolness. Naismith filled his lungs again and again; earth smells, green smells, scents of spring flowers.

He sat down and watched the great wrinkled sheet of cloud drift slowly toward the west. Down below, the shadow-egg still hovered over the plain, a hundred yards or so away. He could just make out Lall’s and Churan’s faces: they seemed close in conversation. Farther out, a flock of birds arose from the grass and settled again. Still farther away, Naismith saw a larger body moving through the grassy hummocks—a quad-ruped, too large for a deer; perhaps an elk. But there were no men. Not a thread of smoke; not a cloud of dust.

From this height, he could see the immense buried shape of the ship more plainly. The world around him was peaceful and empty, as if waiting for another Creation.

Naismith thought of the blank thirty-one years of his life, and of his four years in California, now seen as futile and mis-understood; then of the tremendous distance he had traveled in the shadow-egg with Lall and Churan—-over nine thousand years; and the Earth was still here with its seasons.… He thought of the distance he had yet to go—“twenty thousand years, Mr. Naismith,” Churan had said. And it seemed to him, as it had from the beginning, that there was a monstrous meaning hidden in all this. It was all around him, in the slow drift of the clouds across the sky, in the sense of the buried giant under his feet. For the first time, he felt less as if he were fighting a battle than as if he were engaged in a quest for knowledge.