Damon Knight - Stranger Station

There was a pause. “No,” said Aunt Jane.

’There was more -to it when I was a kid,” Wesson complained nervously. “I read that book when I was twelve, and I remember a long description of the alien—that is, I remember its being there.” He swung around. “Listen, Aunt Jane—you’re a sort of universal watchdog, that right? You’ve got cameras and mikes all over the Station?”

“Yes,” said the network, sounding—was it Wesson’s imagination?—faintly injured.

“Well, what about Sector Two? You must have cameras up there, too, isn’t that so?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then you can tell me. What do the aliens look like?”

There was a definite pause. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that,” said Aunt Jane.

“No,” said Wesson, “I didn’t think you could. You’ve got orders not to, I guess, for the same reason those history books have been cut since I was a kid. Now, what would the reason be? Have you got any idea, Aunt Jane?”

There was another pause. “Yes,” the voice admitted.

“Well?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t—”

“—tell you that,” Wesson repeated along with it. “All right. At least we know where we stand.”

“Yes, Sergeant. Would you like some dessert?”

“No dessert. One other thing. What happens to Station watchmen, like me, after their tour of duty ?”

“They are upgraded to Class Seven, students with unlimited leisure, and receive outright gifts of seven thousand stellors, plus free Class One housing…”

“Yeah, I know all that,” said Wesson, licking his dry lips. “But here’s what I’m asking you. The ones you know—what kind of shape were they in when they left here?”

“The usual human shape,” said the voice brightly. “Why do you ask, Sergeant?”

Wesson made a discontented gesture. “Something I remember from a bull session at the Academy. I can’t get it out of my head; I know it had something to do with the Station. Just a part of a sentence: ‘…blind as a bat and white bristles all over…’ Now, would that be a description of the alien—or the watchman when they came to take him away?”

Aunt Jane went into one of her heavy pauses. “All right, I’ll save you the trouble,” said Wesson. “You’re sorry, you can’t tell me that.”

“I am sorry,” said the robot sincerely.

As the slow days passed into weeks, Wesson grew aware of the Station almost as a living thing. He could feel its resilient metal ribs enclosing him, lightly bearing his weight with its own as it swung. He could feel the waiting emptiness “up there,” and he sensed the alert electronic network that spread around him everywhere, watching and probing, trying to anticipate his needs.

Aunt Jane was a model companion. She had a record library of thousands of hours of music; she had films to show him, and microprinted books that he could read on the scanner in the living room; or if he preferred, she would read to him. She controlled the Station’s three telescopes, and on request would give him a view of Earth or the Moon or Home…

But there was no news. Aunt Jane would obligingly turn on the radio receiver if he asked her, but nothing except static came out. That was the thing that weighed most heavily on Wesson, as time passed—the knowledge that radio silence was being imposed on all ships in transit, on the orbital stations, and on the planet-to-space transmitters. It was an enormous, almost a crippling handicap. Some information could be transmitted over relatively short distances by photophone, but ordinarily the whole complex traffic of the space lanes depended on radio.

But this coming alien contact was so delicate a thing that even a radio voice, out here where the Earth was only a tiny disk twice the size of the Moon, might upset it. It was so precarious a thing, Wesson thought, that only one man could be allowed in the Station while the alien was there, and to give that man the company that would keep him sane, they had to install an alpha network…

“Aunt Jane?”

The voice answered promptly, “Yes, Paul.”

“This distress that the books talk about—you wouldn’t know what it is, would you?”

“No, Paul.”

“Because robot brains don’t feel it, right?”

“Right, Paul.”

“So tell me this—why do they need a man here at all? Why can’t they get along with just you?”

A pause. “I don’t know, Paul.” The voice sounded faintly wistful. Were those gradations of tone really in it, Wesson wondered, or was his imagination supplying them?

He got up from the living room couch and paced restlessly back and forth. “Let’s have a look at Earth,” he said. Obediently, the viewing screen on the console glowed into life: there was the blue Earth, swimming deep below him, in its first quarter, jewel bright. “Switch it off,” Wesson said.

“A little music?” suggested the voice, and immediately began to play something soothing, full of woodwinds.

“ No ,” said Wesson. The music stopped.

Wesson’s hands were trembling; he had a caged and frustrated feeling.

The fitted suit was in its locker beside the air lock. Wesson had been topside in it once or twice; there was nothing to see up there, just darkness and cold. But he had to get out of this squirrel cage. He took the suit down and began to get into it.

“Paul,” said Aunt Jane anxiously, “are you feeling nervous?”

“Yes,” he snarled.

’Then don’t go into Sector Two,” said Aunt Jane.

“Don’t tell me what to do, you hunk of tin!” said Wesson with sudden anger. He zipped up the front of his suit with a vicious motion.

Aunt Jane was silent.

Seething, Wesson finished his check-off and opened the lock door.

The air lock, an upright tube barely large enough for one man, was the only passage between Sector One and Sector Two. It was also the only exit from Sector One; to get here in the first place, Wesson had had to enter the big lock at the “south” pole of the sphere, and travel all the way down inside, by drop hole and catwalk. He had been drugged unconscious at the time, of course. When the time came, he would go out the same way; neither the maintenance rocket nor the tanker had any space, or time, to spare.

At the “north” pole, opposite, there was a third air lock, this one so huge it could easily have held an interplanetary freighter. But that was nobody’s business—no human being’s.

In the beam of Wesson’s helmet lamp, the enormous central cavity of the Station was an inky gulf that sent back only remote, mocking glimmers of light. The near walls sparkled with hoarfrost. Sector Two was not yet pressurized; there was only a diffuse vapor that had leaked through the airseal and had long since frozen into the powdery deposit that lined the walls. The metal rang cold under his shod feet; the vast emptiness of the chamber was the more depressing because it-was airless, unwarmed and unlit. Alone , said his footsteps; alone …

He was thirty yards up the catwalk when his anxiety suddenly grew stronger. Wesson stopped in spite of himself and turned clumsily, putting his back to the wall. The support of the solid wall was not enough. The catwalk seemed threatening to tilt underfoot, dropping Mm into the lightless gulf.

Wesson recognized this drained feeling, this metallic taste at the back of his tongue. It was fear.

The thought ticked through his head: They want me to be afraid . But why? Why now? Of what?

Equally suddenly, he knew. The nameless pressure tightened, like a great fist closing, and Wesson had the appalling sense of something so huge that it had no limits at all, descending, with a terrible endless swift slowness…