Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

On the floor of the main airlock was a mound of burned, bluish mineral substance giving no indication whatever that it had once possessed outlandish, incredible life. In the walls of the hangar, at the base were half a dozen new dents, but ricocheting meteors might have made those. The meteoric shell from which this bizarre animal had come had been devoured, so even that was not left for investigation.

He remembered the report of the board of science on Stuyvesant.

“Therefore, in our judgment, Benjamin Stuyvesant suffered from hallucination—”

He would have liked to help Stuyvesant. But on the other hand Stuyvesant had a job with a second-hand space-suit store now, and was getting along pretty well in spite of Spaceways’ dismissal.

“Nothing irregular to report?” repeated Stacey.

Hartigan stared, with one eyebrow sardonically raised, at the plump brunette on the pin Radio Gazette cover pasted to the wall. She stared coyly back over a bare shoulder.

“Nothing irregular to report,” Hartigan said steadily.

When an editor includes a story of his own in a book (a possibly disreputable but nonetheless common practice), a certain diffidence accompanied by a bit of foot-shuffling is in order, as when one is seen in public doing something legal but not quite respectable. So, I’ll just mention that this turned out as a combination of Keith Laumer and H.P. Lovecraft, two writers who loom huge in my mental landscape. Of course, Laumer would have done it better, at least before his stroke, and while Lovecraft appreciated what he called “the interplanetary story” (as when he heaped praise on C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau”), he never showed any interest in writing such yarns himself. Maybe if his beloved Providence had established a colony on another planet . . .

Hank Davis is an editor emeritus at Baen Books. While a naïve youth in the early 1950s (yes, he’s old !), he was led astray by sf comic books, and then by A. E. van Vogt’s Slan , which he read in the Summer 1952 issue of Fantastic Story Quarterly while in the second grade, sealing his fate. He has had stories published mumble-mumble years ago in Analog , If , F&SF , and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series. (There was also a story sold to The Last Dangerous Visions , but let’s not go there.) A native of Kentucky, he currently lives in North Carolina to avoid a long commute to the Baen office.

If the planet hadn’t reminded me so much of Earth, they might not have gotten me. But it did. And they did. I was being stupid, of course.

The Shadow wasn’t there at the time, or I don’t know what might have happened. Maybe nothing different. But it hadn’t been at the edge of my vision for a couple of days, so I took a chance, docked the Dutchman at the Tucker Station at the L5 point, and stepped through the airlock.

I don’t know where the thing goes when it’s away, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know why it . . . takes . . . other people, but not me. So far.

I wasn’t going down to the planet, of course. Even if it hadn’t been blue with white clouds, like Earth, and the clouds hid the shapes of the continents enough so that, if I didn’t look too close, it might be Earth. I didn’t know what the Shadow might do if it were on a planet. Maybe I shouldn’t have been on the space station. But it was between shifts and all the refreshments and amenities were closed. I saw that nobody else was in the observation dome for tourists and business types passing through, and went on in. It had a striking view of the Earthlike planet the station orbited.

It wasn’t Earth, of course. I never go within a hundred lights of Earth.

It turned out that I shouldn’t have gone within a hundred lights of this station, either. The back of my neck was itching, and I had a feeling somebody was watching me. Of course, I often have that feeling, but this didn’t feel like the Shadow.

I turned around quickly. They had moved very quietly, which meant they were professionals. There were five of them, two women and three men, and they had surrounded me before I got the idea anybody was there. “Nice view,” I said.

“You need to come with us,” the beefiest of the bunch said. “Someone wants to have a talk with you.”

They were wearing ordinary clothes, but I had the feeling they were also used to wearing uniforms. Maybe Terran Fleet uniforms. I had thought that after half a century, the Fleet would have stopped looking for me, but maybe I had underestimated their singlemindedness.

Or they might be cops, investigating a string of mysterious disappearances scattered across this arm of the Galaxy. I hadn’t caused any of the disappearances—directly—but I was always there when they happened.

“Let’s see some I.D.,” I said. “And a warrant, if you’re cops. I’ll enjoy the view some more while you’re looking for them,” I said, and turned back to the planet that wasn’t Earth, hanging in the blackness. And I kept turning, fast, but not fast enough. I got beefy boy, whom I took for the leader, in his midsection, but my hand barely clipped the one to his right on his ear, not what I was aiming for. I must have been out of practice.

Suddenly there was something barely noticeable, barely visible out of the corner of my eye, and then one of the women wasn’t there anymore. Not entirely, anyway. As usual, there were pieces of her, falling to the floor in the low gravity of the station, along with her gun, but most of her had disappeared.

I thought that might distract them long enough for me to get the falling gun. I was wrong. The other three of them shot me, simultaneously as far as I could tell, three stunbeams converging on me while I was diving for the gun. I don’t know how close I came to it, because I didn’t know anything anymore, and that situation lasted for a long time. I was out before I even had time to regret they weren’t shooting anything lethal. But maybe that wouldn’t have worked. I’ve tried suicide and it doesn’t work.

They may have shot me more than once, from the way I felt when I finally came out of it. I can’t really blame them. They didn’t know what had suddenly, terribly happened to one of them, and they were scared. Of course, I knew what had happened, and I was scared, too. Particularly since I didn’t know why it happened, either this time or the many other times . . .

I knew Colonel Oberst didn’t like me, but I didn’t think he disliked me enough to get me killed. That might have been a mistake. He had called me into his office inside the officer’s dome and offered me a smoke and a drink. That should have made me worry; but I wasn’t worrying because I was a shorttimer. One more week, and I’d be heading back to Earth and my discharge from the Fleet. Marrying Angie, with a job as a civilian pilot lined up. Buzzing around the Solar System like an electron in a nanocircuit: nice, safe, routine. What could happen now?

“Kelly, I need a volunteer, and I think you’re the best bet.”

I had turned down the smoke, and now I wished I had turned down the drink. Uh-oh.

“Not the gate, I assume, sir?”

“Actually, it is the gate. The rats came back all right, and so did the monkey yesterday. We need a man to go.”