Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

We had two casualties before we reached the field. Harry Voight cut his throat in the washroom, and my gentle old buddy, Seabiscuit, crushed in the back of Hoch McCoy’s head. “He was an Insurrectionist spy,” he insisted mildly, time and again, while we were locking him up.

After that, we kept away from each other. I don’t think I spoke ten words to anyone outside of official business, from that day until we snapped into galactic stasis near Betelgeuse. I was sorry about Hoch, because he was a fine lad. But my sorrow was tempered by the memory of his visit to the captain. There had been a pretty fine chance of his doing that to me.

In normal space once more, we maneuvered our agile little craft into an orbit about the huge sun and threw out our detectors. These wouldn’t tell us much when the time came, for their range wasn’t much more than the radium of the field.

The mad planet swam up onto the plates and I stared at it as I buzzed for the skipper. Xantippe was a strangely dull planet, even this close to her star. She shone dead silver, like a moonlit corpse’s flesh. She was wrinkled and patched, and—perhaps it was an etheric disturbance—she seemed to pulsate slowly from pole to pole. She wasn’t quite round: more nearly an ovoid, with the smaller end toward Betelgeuse! She was between two and three times the size of Luna. Gazing at her, I thought of the thousands of men of my own service who had fallen prey to her, and of the fine ships of war that had plunged into the field and disappeared. Had they crashed? Had they been tucked into some weird warp of space? Were they captives of some strange and horrible race?

Xantippe had defied every type of attack so far. She swallowed up atomic mines and torpedoes with no appreciable effect. She was apparently impervious to any rayed vibration known to man; but she was matter, and should be easy meat for an infragun—if you could get an infragun close enough. The gun’s twin streams of highly charged particles, positrons on one side, mesatrons on the other, would destroy anything that happened to be where they converged. But an infragun has an effective range of less than five hundred miles. Heretofore, any ship which carried the weapon that close to Xantippe carried also a dead or mindless crew.

Captain Parks called the crew into the control room as soon as he arrived. No one spoke much: they didn’t need any more information after they had glanced at the viewplate which formed the forward wall of the chamber. Bort Brecht, the swarthy engineer, wanted to know how soon we’d engage the field.

“In about two hours,” said the captain glibly. I got a two-handed grip on myself to keep from yapping. He was a cold-blooded liar—we’d hit it in half an hour or less, the way I figured it. I guessed that he had his own reasons. Perhaps he thought it would be easier on the crew that way.

Parks leaned casually against the integrators and faced the crew. “Well, gentlemen,” he said as if he were banqueting on Earth, “we’ll soon find out what this is all about. I have instructions from the league to place certain information at your disposal.

“All hands are cautioned to obey the obvious commander once we’re inside the field. That commander may or may not be myself. That has been arranged for. Each man must keep in mind the objective—the destruction of the Xantippean Field. One of us will lead the others toward that objective. Should no one seem to be in command a pro-tem captain is to be elected.”

Brecht spoke up. “Cap’n, how do we know that this ‘commander’ that has been arranged for isn’t Harry Voight or Hoch McCoy?”

“We don’t know,” said Parks gravely. “But we will. We will.”

Twenty-three minutes after Xantippe showed up on the plates, we engaged her field.

All hands were still in the control room when we plunged in. I remember the sudden weakness of my limbs, and the way all five of the others slipped and slid down to the deck. I remember the Biscuit’s quaver, “I tell you it’s all a dirty Insurrectionist plot.” And then I was down on the deck, too.

Something was hurting me, but I knew exactly where I was. I was under Dr. Grenfell’s torture machine; it was tearing into my mind, chilling my brain. I could feel my brains, every last convolution of them. They were getting colder and colder, and bigger and bigger, and pretty soon now they would burst my skull and the laboratory and the building and chill the Earth. Inside my chest I was hot, and of course I knew why. I was Betelgeuse, mightiest of suns, and with my own warmth. I warmed half a galaxy. Soon I would destroy it, too, and that would be nice.

All the darkness in Great Space came to me.

Leave me alone. I don’t care what you want done. I just want to lie here and— But nobody wanted me to do anything. What’s all the hollering about, then? Oh. I wanted something done. There’s something that has to be done, so get up, get up, get—

“He is dead. Death is but a sleep and a forgetting, and he’s asleep, and he’s forgotten everything, so he must be dead!” It was Phil Hartley. He was down on his hunkers beside me, shrieking at the top of his voice, mouthing and pointing like an ape completely caught up in the violence of his argument. Which was odd, because he wasn’t arguing with anybody. The skipper was sitting silently in the pilot’s chair, tears streaming down his cheeks. Jo Hartley was dead or passed out on the deck. The Biscuit and Bort Brecht were sitting on the deck holding hands like children, starring entranced into the viewplate. It showed a quadrant of Xantippe, filing the screen. The planet’s surface did indeed pulsate, and it was a beautiful sight. I wanted to watch it drawing closer and closer, but there was something that had to be done first.

I sat up achingly. “Get me some water,” I muttered to Phil Hartley. He looked at me, shrieked, and went and hid under the chart table.

The vision of Xantippe caught and held me again, but I shook it off. It was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen and it promised me all I could ever want, but there was something I had to do first. Maybe someone could tell me. I shook the skipper’s shoulder.

“Go away,” he said. I shook him again. He made no response. Fury snapped into my brain. I cuffed him with my open hand, front and back, front and back. He leaped to his feet, screamed, “Leave me alone!” and slumped back into the chair. At the sound Bort Brecht lurched to his feet and came over to us. When he let go Seabiscuit’s hand, the Biscuit began to cry quietly.

“I’m giving the orders around here,” Bort said.

I was delighted. There had been something, a long time ago, about somebody giving orders. “I have to do something,” I said. “Do you know what it is?”

“Come with me.” He led the way, swaggering, to the screen. “Look,” he commanded, and then sat down beside Seabiscuit and lost himself in contemplation. Seabiscuit kept on crying.

“That’s not it,” I said doubtfully. “I think you gave me the wrong orders.”

“Wrong?” he bellowed. “Wrong? I am never wrong!” He got up, and before I knew what was coming, he hauled off and cracked three knuckles with my jawbone. I hit the deck with a crash and slid up against Jo Hartley. Jo didn’t move. He was alive, but he just didn’t seem to give a damn. I lay there for a long time before I could get up again. I wanted to kill Bort Brecht, but there was something I had to do first.

I went back to the captain and butted him out of the chair. He snarled at me and went and crouched by the bulkhead, tears still streaming down his cheeks. I slumped into the seat, my fingers wandering idly about the controls without touching them, my eyes desperately trying to avoid the glory of Xantippe.