Damon Knight: Stranger Station

Deep in the vats, the vats, the golden liquid was trickling down: “ Though disgusted, I took a sample of the exudate, and it was forwarded for analysis …”

Space-cold fluid, trickling down the bitter walls of the tubes, forming little pools in the cups of darkness; goldenly agleam there, half alive. The golden elixir. One drop of the concentrate would arrest aging for twenty years—keep your arteries soft, tonus good, eyes clear, hair pigmented, brain alert.

That was what the tests of Pigeon’s sample had showed. That was the reason for the whole crazy history of the “alien trading post”—first a hut on Titan, then later, when people understood more about the problem, Stranger Station.

Once every twenty years, an alien would come down out of Somewhere, and sit in the tiny cage we had made for him, and make us rich beyond our dreams—rich with life—and still we did not know why.

Above him, Wesson imagined he could see that sensed body awallow in the glacial blackness, its bulk passively turning with the Station’s spin, bleeding a chill gold into the lips of the tubes—drip… drop…

Wesson held his head. The pressure inside made it hard to think; it felt as if his skull were about to fly apart. “Aunt Jane,” he said.

“Yes, Paul.” The kindly, comforting voice, like a nurse. The nurse who stands beside your cot while you have painful, necessary things done to you. Efficient, trained friendliness.

“Aunt Jane,” said Wesson, “do you know why they keep coming back?”

“No,” said the voice precisely. “It is a mystery.”

Wesson nodded. “I had,” he said, “an interview with Gower before I left Home. You know Gower? Chief of the Outer-world Bureau. Came up especially to see me.”

“Yes?” said Aunt Jane encouragingly.

“Said to me, Wesson, you got to find out. Find out if we can count on them to keep up the supply. You know? There’s fifty million more of us,’ he says,than when you were born. We need more of the stuff, and we got to know if we can count on it. Because,’ he says, ‘you know what would happen if it stopped?’ Do you know, Aunt Jane?”

“It would be,” said the voice, “a catastrophe.”

“That’s right,” Wesson said respectfully. “It would. Like, he says to me, What if the people in the Nefud area were cut off from the Jordan Valley Authority? Why, there’d be millions dying of thirst in a week.

“ ‘Or what if the freighters stopped coming to Moon Base? Why,’ he says, ‘there’d be thousands starving and smothering to death.’

“He says, ‘Where the water is, where you can get food and air, people are going to settle and get married, you know? And have kids.

“He says, ‘If the so-called longevity serum stopped coming…’ Says, ‘Every twentieth adult in the Sol family is due for his shot this year.’ Says, ‘Of those, almost twenty percent are one hundred fifteen or older.’ Says, ‘The deaths in that group in the first year would be at least three times what the actuarial tables call for.’ ” Wesson raised a strained face.

“I’m thirty-four, you know?” he said. “That Gower, he made me feel like a baby.”

Aunt Jane made a sympathetic noise.

“Drip, drip,” said Wesson hysterically. The needles of the tall golden indicators were infinitesimally higher. “Every twenty years we need more of the stuff, so somebody like me has to come out and take it for five lousy months. And one of them has to come out and sit there, and drip. Why , Aunt Jane? What for? Why should it matter to them whether we live a long time or not? Why do they keep on coming back? What do they take away from here?”

But to these questions, Aunt Jane had no reply.

All day and every day, the lights burned cold and steady in the circular gray corridor around the rim of Sector One. The hard gray flooring had been deeply scuffed in that circular path before Wesson ever walked there—the corridor existed for that only, like a treadmill in a squirrel cage. It said “Walk,” and Wesson walked. A man would go crazy if he sat still, with that squirming, indescribable pressure on his head; and so Wesson paced off the miles, all day and every day, until he dropped like a dead man in the bed at night.

He talked, too, sometimes to himself, sometimes to the listening alpha network; sometimes it was difficult to tell which. “Moss on a rock,” he muttered, pacing. “Told him, wouldn’t give twenty mills for any shell… Little pebbles down there, all colors.” He shuffled on in silence for a while. Abruptly: “I don’t see why they couldn’t have given me a cat.”

Aunt Jane said nothing. After a moment Wesson went on, “Nearly everybody at Home has a cat, for God’s sake, or a goldfish or something. You’re all right, Aunt Jane, but I can’t see you. My God, I mean if they couldn’t send a man a woman for company—what I mean, my God, I never liked cats .” He swung around the doorway into the bedroom, and absentmindedly slammed his fist into the bloody place on the wall.

“But a cat would have been something ,” he said.

Aunt Jane was still silent.

“Don’t pretend your feelings are hurt. I know you, you’re only a machine,” said Wesson. “Listen, Aunt Jane, I remember a cereal package one time that had a horse and a cowboy on the side. There wasn’t much room, so about all you saw was their faces. It used to strike me funny how much they looked alike. Two ears on the top with hair in the middle. Two eyes. Nose. Mouth with teeth in it. I was thinking, we’re kind of distant cousins, aren’t we, us and the horses. But compared to that thing up there—we’re brothers . You know?”

“Yes,” said Aunt Jane quietly.

“So I keep asking myself, why couldn’t they have sent a horse or a cat instead of a man? But I guess the answer is because only a man could take what I’m taking. God, only a man. Right?”

“Right,” said Aunt Jane with deep sorrow.

Wesson stopped at the bedroom doorway again and shuddered, holding onto the frame. “Aunt Jane,” he said in a low, clear voice, “you take pictures of him up there, don’t you?”

“Yes, Paul.”

“And you take pictures of me. And then what happens? After it’s all over, who looks at the pictures?”

“I don’t know,” said Aunt Jane humbly.

“You don’t know. But whoever looks at ’em, it doesn’t do any good. Right? We got to find out why, why, why… And we never do find out, do we?”

“No,” said Aunt Jane.

“But don’t they figure that if the man who’s going through it could see him, he might be able to tell something? That other people couldn’t? Doesn’t that make sense?”

“That’s out of my hands, Paul.”

He sniggered. “That’s funny. Oh, that’s funny.” He chortled in his throat, reeling around the circuit.

“Yes, that’s funny,” said Aunt Jane.

“Aunt Jane, tell me what happens to the watchmen.”

“I can’t tell you that, Paul.”

He lurched into the living room, sat down before the console, beat on its smooth, cold metal with his fists. “What are you, some kind of monster? Isn’t there any blood in your veins, or oil or anything ?”

“Please, Paul—”

“Don’t you see, all I want to know, can they talk? Can they tell anything after their tour is over?”

“No, Paul.”

He stood upright, clutching the console for balance. “They can’t? No, I figured. And you know why?”

“No.”

“Up there,” said Wesson obscurely. “Moss on the rock.”

“Paul, what?”

“We get changed,” said Wesson, stumbling out of the room again. “We get changed. Like a piece of iron next to a magnet. Can’t help it. You—nonmagnetic, I guess. Goes right through you, huh, Aunt Jane? You don’t get changed. You stay here, wait for the next one.”