Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

It seemed to me that I was very near to the thing I was to do. My right hand touched the infragun activator switch, came away, went back to it, came away. I boldly threw the other switch; a network of crosshairs and a bright central circle appeared on the screen. This was it, I thought. Bort Brecht yelped like a kicked dog when the crosshairs appeared, but did not move. I activated the gun, and grasped the range lever in one hand and the elevation control in the other. A black-centered ball of flame hovered near the surface of the planet.

This was it! I laughed exultantly and pushed the range lever forward. The ball plunged into the dull-silver mystery, leaving a great blank crater. I pulled and pushed at the elevation control, knowing that my lovely little ball was burning and tearing its inexorable way about in the planet’s vitals. I drew it out to the surface, lashed it up and down and right and left, cut and slashed and tore.

Bort Brecht was crouched like an anthropoid, knees bent, knuckles on the deck, fury knotting his features, eyes fixed on the scene of destruction. Behind me, Phil Hartley was teetering on tiptoe, little cries of pain struggling out of his lips every time the fireball appeared. Bort spun and was beside me in one great leap. “What’s happening? Who’s doing that?”

“He is,” I said immediately, pointing at Jo Hartley. I knew that this was going to be tough on Jo, but I was doing the thing I had to do, and I knew Bort would try to stop me. Bort leaped on the prone figure, using teeth and nails and fists and feet; and Phil Hartley hesitated only a minute, torn between the vision of Xantippe and something that called to him from what seemed a long, long while ago. Then Jo cried out in agony, and Phil, a human prototype of my fireball, struck Bort amidships. Back and forth, fore and aft, the bloody battle raged, while Seabiscuit whimpered and the skipper, still sunk in his introspective trance, wept silent. And I cut and stabbed and ripped at Xantippe.

I took care now, and cut a long slash almost from pole to pole; and the edges opened away from the wound as if the planet had been wrapped in a paper sheath. Underneath it was an olive-drab color, shot with scarlet. I cut at this incision again and again, sinking my fireball in deeper at each slash. The weakened ovoid tended to press the edges together, but the irresistible ball sheared them away as it passed; and when it had cut nearly all the through, the whole structure fell in on itself horribly. I had a sudden feeling of lightness, and then unbearable agony. I remember stretching back and back over the chair in the throes of some tremendous attack from inside my body, and then I struck the deck with my head and shoulders, and I was all by myself again in the beautiful black.

There was a succession of lights that hurt, and soothing smells, and the sound of arcs and the sound of falling water. Some of them were weeks apart, some seconds. Sometimes I was conscious and could see people tiptoeing about. Once I thought I heard music.

But at last I awoke quietly, very weak to a hand on my shoulder. I looked up. It was Dr. Renn. He looked older.

“How do you feel, Rip?”

“Hungry.”

He laughed. “That’s splendid. Know where you are?”

I shook my head, marveling that it didn’t hurt me.

“Earth,” he said. “Psy hospital. You’ve been through the mill, son.”

“What happened?”

“Plenty. We got the whole story from the picrecording tapes inside and outside of your ship. You cut Xantippe all to pieces. You incidentally got Bort Brecht started on the Hartley family, which later literally cut him to pieces. It cost three lives, but Xantippe is through.”

“Then—I destroyed the projector, or whatever it was—”

“You destroyed Xantippe. You—killed Xantippe. The planet was a . . . a thing that I hardly dare think about. You ever see a hydromedusa here on Earth?”

“You mean one of those jellyfish that floats on the surface of the sea and dangles paralyzing tentacles down to catch fish?”

“That’s it. Like a Portugese man-of-war. Well, that was Xantippe, with that strange mind field about her for her tentacles. A space dweller; she swept up anything that came her way, killed what was killable, digested what was digestible to her. Examination of the pictures, incidentally, shows that she was all set to hurl out a great cloud of spores. One more revolution about Betelgeuse and she’d have done it.”

“How come I went under like that?” I was beginning to remember.

“You weren’t as well protected as the others. You see, when we trained that crew we carefully split the personalities; paranoiac hatred to carry them through the field and an instant reversion to manic depressive under the influence of the field. But yours was the only personality we couldn’t split. So you were the leader—you were delegated to do the job. All we could do to you was to implant a desire to destroy Xantippe. You did the rest. But when the psychic weight of the field was lifted from you, your mind collapsed. We had a sweet job rebuilding it, too, let me tell you!”

“Why all that business about the ‘one sane man’?”

Renn grinned. “That was to keep the rest of the crew fairly sure of themselves, and to keep you from the temptation of taking over before you reached the field, knowing that the rest, including the captain, were not responsible for their actions.”

“What about the others, after the field disappeared?”

“They reverted to something like normal. Not quite, though. The quartermaster tied up the rest of the crew just before they reached Earth and handed them over to us as Insurrectionist spies!

“But as for you, there’s a command waiting for you if you want it.”

“I want it,” I said. He clapped me on the shoulder and left. Then they brought me a man-sized dinner.

Here’s another ominous region of space from which few ships have returned. The two undercover agents were aware of that (one of them painfully so), but their job at hand was getting the goods on a smuggling operation that was stealing valuable items from a scientific repository. Then a ship full of well-armed smugglers showed up. And so did a thing from that deadly region of lost starships, looking for something that had been stolen from its domain . . .

James H. Schmitz (1911-1981) was a master of action-adventure science fiction, notably his stories of the Hub, a loosely-bound confederation of star systems. His most popular characters were Telzey Amberdon, the spunky teenage telepath, and Trigger Argee, a crack shot with a gun and reflexes that made lighting look lethargic. His most popular novel, The Witches of Karres , though not part of the Hub universe, is a classic space opera. Many of his sf adventure tales have scary moments, and this one has them in spades.

It was night in that part of the world of Mezmiali—deep night, for much of the sky was obscured by the dense cosmic cloud called the Pit, little more than two light-years away. Overhead, only a scattering of nearby stars twinkled against the sullen gloom of the cloud. Far to the east, its curving edges were limned in brilliance, for beyond it, still just below the horizon, blazed the central sun clusters of the Hub.

The landscaped private spaceport was well lit but almost deserted. A number of small ships stood about in their individual stations, and two watchmen on a pair of float scooters were making a tour of the grounds, moving along unhurriedly twenty feet up in the air. They weren’t too concerned about intruders—the ships were locked and there was little else of value around to steal. But their duties included inspecting the area every two hours, and they were doing it.