Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

Chirik shared my unease, however. He put out his hand and awkwardly patted the stranger’s skin.

“Easy there,” he said. “Cut out your senses if you can. If you can’t, well, the operation is nearly finished. Then we’ll repower you, and you’ll soon be fit and happy again, healed and fitted and reassembled.”

I decided that I liked Chirik very much just then. He exhibited almost as much self-induced empathy as any reporter; he might even come to like my favourite blue stars, despite his cold scientific exactitude in most respects.

My recorder tape shows, in its reproduction of certain sounds, how I was torn away from this strained reverie.

During the one-and-a-half seconds since I had recorded the distinct vocables “burning me alive,” the stranger’s words had become quite blurred, running together and rising even higher in pitch until they reached a sustained note—around E-flat in the standard sonic scale.

It was not like a voice at all.

This high, whining noise was suddenly modulated by apparent words without changing its pitch. Transcribing what seem to be words is almost impossible, as you can see for yourself—this is the closest I can come phonetically:

“Eeeeahahmbeeeeing baked aliiive in an uvennn ahdeeer-jeeesussunmuuutherrr! “

The note swooped higher and higher until it must have neared supersonic range, almost beyond either my direct or recorded hearing.

Then it stopped as quickly as a contact break.

And although the soft hiss of the stranger’s carrier wave carried on without perceptible diminution, indicating that some degree of awareness existed, I experienced at that moment one of those quirks of intuition given only to reporters:

I felt that I would never greet the beautiful stranger from the sky in his full senses.

Chur-chur was muttering to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger’s skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of nearly white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple.

A billow of smoke puffed out of the orifice. Despite my repugnance, I thought of my duty as a reporter and forced myself to look over Chur-chur’s shoulder.

The fumes came from a soft, charred, curiously shaped mass of something which lay just inside the opening. “Undoubtedly a kind of insulating material,” Chur-chur explained.

He drew out the crumpled blackish heap and placed it carefully on a tray. A small portion broke away, showing a red, viscid substance.

“It looks complex,” Chur-chur said, “but I expect the stranger will be able to tell us how to reconstitute it or make a substitute.”

His assistant gently cleaned the wound of the remainder of the material, which he placed with the rest; and Chur-chur resumed his inspection of the orifice.

You can, if you want, read the technical accounts of Chur-chur’s discovery of the stranger’s double skin at the point where the cut was made; of the incredible complexity of his driving mechanism, involving principles which are still not understood to this day; of the museum’s failure to analyse the exact nature and function of the insulating material found in only that one portion of his body; and of the other scientific mysteries connected with him.

But this is my personal, non-scientific account. I shall never forget hearing about the greatest mystery of all, for which not even the most tentative explanation has been adðvanced, nor the utter bewilderment with which Chur-chur announced his initial findings that day.

He had hurriedly converted himself to a convenient size to permit actual entry into the stranger’s body.

When he emerged, he stood in silence for several minutes. Then, very slowly, he said:

“I have examined the ‘central brain’ in the forepart of his body. It is no more than a simple auxiliary computer mechanism. It does not possess the slightest trace of conðsciousness. And there is no other conceivable centre of inðtelligence in the remainder of his body.”

There is something I wish I could forget. I can’t explain why it should upset me so much. But I always stop the tape before it reaches the point where the voice of the stranger rises in pitch, going higher and higher until it cuts out.

There’s a quality about that noise that makes me tremble and think of rust.

Being afraid of the dark is common among children, and would probably be considered more common among adults, if they weren’t embarrassed to admit it. Once, there actually were dangerous things out there, circling the fire (better not let it go out), looking in to the cave mouth with eyes reflecting that firelight, but now things are different. The night can be banished with a flip of an electric switch, and the deadliest predators are either extinct or kept in zoo cages. But suppose there were other, even deadlier creatures who moved away from the realm of machines and lights. Suppose they now lurk in the dark of space . . . waiting for an opportunity to show their power again.

Sarah A. Hoyt won the Prometheus Award for her novel Darkship Thieves , published by Baen, and has authored Darkship Renegades and A Few Good Men , two more novels set in the same universe, as was “Angel in Flight,” a story in the first installment of A Cosmic Christmas . Darkship Renegades is presently a Prometheus Award nominee. She has written numerous short stories and novels in a number of genres, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical novels and historical mysteries, much under a number of pseudonyms, and has been published—among other places—in Analog , Asimov’s and Amazing . For Baen, she has also written three books in her popular shape-shifter fantasy series, Draw One in the Dark , Gentleman Takes a Chance , and Noah’s Boy . Her According to Hoyt is one of the most interesting blogs on the internet. Originally from Portugal, she lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons and the surfeit of cats necessary to a die-hard Heinlein fan.

“What if they were really there,” Jack said. He came out of the engine room, looking like something dredged up from a dark sea—all flying white hair, and wide blue eyes that looked like they should be blind. Spacer’s eyes they call them. “What if they were really there?” he asked. “Those monsters, those dragons, those creatures ready to swallow ships, ready to render humans mad, ready to tear apart the faint shell of reason we use to paint over what we don’t know?”

He’d been enlarging on this theme for the last three hours: the monsters who’d once threatened seafarers. He’d read to me from an account in the ship’s database—not standard issue I was sure—of a dragon-like creature flying round and round a ship’s sails and finally making them burn, and all the sailors lost, which made me wonder who’d written the account and known how many times the monster went around the mast and how his wings sounded like moth’s wings in the wind, and how he obscured the sun.

He’d been talking about it, all the while he was in the engine room, working on the faltering engine of this fifty year old mining ship. And from outside, now and then, as I listened to the tinker and swish of tools, to the idiot beeping of the machine as it tried to establish normal function, I’d shouted, “Then they weren’t. If they existed where did they go? Where did they hide?” Now I said it again, quietly, and I added, “Because we’ve crisscrossed the Earth with ships, and we’ve gridded her with communications satellites, and these monsters don’t exist.”

Jack gave me a slitty-eyed look, and a corner of his mouth twitched up. He was wiping his hands to a huge, oil-stained rag. It was as if the ship’s engine had bled all over them.