Пол Андерсон: Orbit 1

Staeen sighed. A layer of his mantle sloughed off and was flushed away. He turned off the mist then and joined the Flonderans. He felt very well and healthy. His mantle was shiny-black now.

“You okay?” Conly asked. He was standing at the port; he turned when Staeen came in, and at Staeen’s affirmative ripple of his mantle, he again directed bitter eyes toward space as if hoping to see the answer there. “Why? Why would the captain order the ship abandoned? Did he order it even? Not a sign of attack. No weapon out..”

“Capture of the entire crew?” Staeen said.

Conly shrugged again. “They would have put up resistance. You’ve read our psychology books, and our histories. You’ve been out on five recon missions with Malko and me. Do you think Earthmen are cowards?”

Staeen knew they were not. Fear, if present, would beat against him like a storm tide on an open shore. No such waves emanated from them.

“If they had been threatened, they would have fought,” Malko said. “If they had to outrun something, why the lifeboats? Why not the ship itself? There was nothing wrong with it! Nothing! All that damage was done after they left, because they left.”

Conly returned to his contour seat, kicked it and then let himself drop to it. He stared at the control panel and said heavily, “Let’s give her one more going over, then we turn back.”

Malko grunted; his fingers combed through his beard abstractedly. Staeen could feel their disappointment and restlessness. Like children, he thought again. If they could not have the answer, they did not want the question. Unlike his people who loved paradoxes and puzzles for their own sake, the Flonderans merely grew annoyed with unanswered questions. It was because of their short lives, he decided. They knew they could not afford the thousands of years it sometimes took to find the answers.

“How many small craft were aboard the mother ship?” he asked.

Conly shifted to stare at him. His voice was a snarl when he said, “We should have thought of that! They took every lifeboat, scout, landing craft, everything! There were eighteen to twenty lifeboats and half a dozen other miscellaneous craft aboard. They knew they couldn’t last more than four days in the landing craft….”

“Even the repair boats,” Malko said. “They’re gone. Six hours, eight at the most in space in one of those. .”

Staeen looked at the hairy man and felt waves of dread coming from him. Six to eight hours in space, then death from anoxia. He shuddered inside his mantle.

Brusquely Conly said, “Okay, let’s get back. This time we split up and go through the private quarters. Try to find a note, a scrap of paper, a scrawl on the wall, anything that might give us a clue. Staeen—”

“I too can search,” Staeen said.

Alone inside the great ship, Staeen let himself go, let it come to him. Hanging in a corridor lined with the oval doors, he thought of nothing, not even the sensations he received. He looked like a black shadow unanchored to reality as he hung there, shiny black slowly changing to a duller shade as his mantel adapted to the radiation. From a distance he felt echoes of doubts and apprehensions: Malko’s waves.

From another direction came fainter wafts of determination mixed with the same doubts, and perhaps even a touch of fear, formless and unnamed as yet. For a brief time he was one with the ship: unguided, unmanned, alone in space on a course that would take it beyond the galaxy to the nothingness that lay between the oases of life. He shuddered with the ship, feeling the vibrations of the metal under impacts from meteorites, sharp-edged bits of metallic ores set loose in space to roam forever until captured, or destroyed.

He felt the weight of the galaxy resting on himself as bits and pieces of space debris hit the ship and clung, giving it added mass. He knew that one day there would be enough mass so that planetoids could be captured, and under the pressure the ship at the core would be crushed and finally molten. It would sweep the path of its trajectory and its gravitational field would reach out farther and farther, insatiably then, and in a million years, or one thousand million, it would be caught by a hungry sun. Resisting for a while the end of its freedom in space, it would refuse a stable orbit, but in time it would become a captive like all planets. Staeen wondered if it would give birth to creatures who would pose questions of cosmology, wondering at the earth below them, at its origin, its eventual death.

Staeen continued to hang in the corridor, and now sensations too faint to be identified drifted into him. The temptation to strain to receive them better was great, but he resisted; it would be like straining too hard to hear a whisper only barely within hearing range. One either heard it, or did not. He let the feelings enter him without trying to sort them.

Emotions had been expressed with every footstep, with every grasp of a door handle, every yank on a drawer, with every shout and curse uttered by the men preparing to abandon the ship. The ship had vibrated with a different tempo of the emotions, and some of the vibrations still echoed along the molecules. Staeen intercepted them with his body and, after a long time without movement, he stirred, his mantle rippling slightly as he shifted his position. A great sadness filled him because he knew the answer he had found could not be accepted by the Flonderans. In the madness of fear the crew had left the ship.

What, or whom, had they feared to the point of insanity?

Staeen pondered that as he started to investigate the rooms assigned to him. He expected to find nothing, but his search was methodical. He had offered to help to the best of his ability and would do so.

He found nothing in any of the rooms he searched. Now and again a stronger wave of the same crawling, irrational fear bathed him when he opened a door that had been closed since the ship was abandoned, but there was nothing to indicate its source.

Malko and Conly were depressed and irritable when they returned to the scout. Staeen soaked in his mist of salt, ammonia and water blissfully while the Flonderans unsuited and decontaminated their suits. The three gathered in the cabin afterward.

“I’m going to call it a bust,” Conly said, running his hand over his shaved head. He looked tired and dejected.

Malko simply nodded. Scowl lines cut into his dark face and his deep eyes were shadowed. “Read about ocean ships being found like that,” he said. “It looked like everyone just quit whatever he was doing and jumped over the side. No explanation ever given, far’s I know.”

“We’ll make our independent reports as usual then,” Conly said. He looked at Staeen. “Will you add whatever impressions you got from her?”

Staeen agreed. He gazed from the port at the ship, an unsteady pad beneath the small scout. She would sail on, not worth salvaging, keeping her wobbling course toward the rim of the galaxy, and her mystery would go with her beyond recall.

Two days later the scout was streaking back toward her port when a blip appeared on the scanner screen. Malko, at the controls, decelerated and he and Conly watched the blip.

“Shouldn’t be one of ours,” Conly said. “This is a hell of a long way off course for any place we’d want to go.” He kept his eyes on the growing blob of light on the screen. The object was almost close enough now for a visual sighting. “How about your people, Staeen? Any reason for them to man a ship and come out here?”

Staeen wriggled his tentacles with excitement. “It must be the regular visit of the Thosars,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I was a boy during their last visit. They come bringing news of the galaxy, exchanging new ideas. They make a regular sweep of the galaxy every twelve thousands of your years. .”