Fiction

[Editor’s Note: Read the entire story from the beginning!]

Running through the framework that had finally manifested itself in Gerd’s back room was a network of the thinnest components that were linked together in chains. Once again, the reddish-brown sphere seemed to beckon. Based on nothing else but gut instinct, Tucky twisted the sphere’s top half a full three turns until the entire super structure glowed with a holographic depiction of a tight-fitting skin, built up from a mesh of impossibly dense microfibers. He cocked his head to one side.

“Now what?” he asked. “Where am I going to find that … that shell?”

Once again Olga’s voice broke in on his consciousness, sounding distant and strangely ethereal. Tucky turned his head to see her stand, or rather float over him.

“The ship will find what it needs,” she said. “It will construct its own skin from all available resources.”

Instantly, a small section of the rear half of the framework began to glow and a silver serving tray hanging on the opposite wall began to vaporize, its molecules streaming across the room to the exact spot on the framework that had begun glowing. Before long, the tray had vanished, its silver deposited precisely along one tightly-woven stretch of the structure. Out of the corner of his eye, Tucky saw two more sections of the framework begin to glow. First a glass vase and then the copper wire lying next to it, were also gradually vaporized and assimilated into the framework. Olga floated down to floor level and gave him a powerful shove toward the shop’s door.

“Get out!” she said.

“But I want to see,” said Tucky.

The lovely young woman fixed his eyes in a searing gaze, until he wondered if they would actually catch fire. She shoved him toward the door again, even harder than before.

“You didn’t hear me,” she said. “All available resources. That includes you.”

Tucky’s eyes opened wide, and he turned to rush out of the shop, but not before grabbing the tablet off the workbench.

“Leave that,” shouted Olga, “it’s of no use to you!”

Tucky ignored her, and ran out to the sidewalk, the tablet clenched in a white-knuckle grip.

“Drop it!” he heard Olga shout again, from the shop’s threshold.

“You don’t understand,” he shouted back. “If I lose this device, I’ll have no proof! Nothing to prove what I’ve accomplished.”

And in that moment, as he heard himself call the tablet a “device,” Inga’s words finally made sense. With astonishing speed, Olga ran up to him and tugged at the tablet with both hands.

“We can go anywhere together, my sweet baby,” she said. “Once the ship is complete, we can fly to the farthest reaches of the universe, but I need that to make a few minor adjustments before….”

Tucky’s torso shuddered as he felt her influence growing stronger. Even so, the sight of the alien ship assimilating material from Gerd’s shop at a faster and faster pace spurred him to action. In spite of his unmitigated lust for Olga, he growled fiercely, pushed her aside with all his strength and ran down the sidewalk toward the Ohio River. He stabbed at his Samsung Galaxy until he found one of Inga’s messages, then held the cracked screen up to his ear, as it replayed her voicemail. He hoped, the farther he got from Olga, that Inga’s voice would help him summon the will to…

“… smash it with a blunt object….” Inge’s voice rang out of his phone. “Smash it….”

Despite the intensity of Olga’s presence in his mind, which grew more irresistible by the second, he forced himself down the slope to the water, his eyes searching this way and that for a stone large enough to….

There! There! There!

He smashed the tablet into the side of a large metal oil drum, probably rolled there by a pack of bored teenagers looking for another pointless rite of passage. A rite of passage leading to this, he realized, as he stood there, a so-called adult, fleeing for his life from a woman who may or may not even exist.

Now as the tablet lay smashed, twisted and drained of power at his feet, he felt his mind clear for the first time since … since … he opened that first Kroger box back at Wrangel Repair & Thrift a week earlier. His jaw clenched, he stomped the tablet’s cracked fragments down into the mud, then shuffled as many dead leaves as he could find over their remains. His breath ragged, he gazed out over the river and tried to remember what he’d been thinking on Monday morning, before Drew Flaherty had inadvertently turned his life upside down. As soon as his breathing settled, he crept back to the sidewalk and peered along the street at Gerd’s shop.

Seconds later it was gone, imploded by Olga’s ship in its final phase of assimilation. What would the people of Carrollton say to that, he wondered? But as he made his way slowly along the sidewalk, he could see the destruction of Wrangel Repair & Thrift had gone unnoticed. There in its place stood the graceful outlines of the ship, gradually camouflaging itself until it was now a perfect replica of the shop it had just absorbed.

As he stared, slack-jawed, Tucky’s point-blank astonishment was interrupted by his Samsung’s ringtone. When he picked up, Inga Gestirn’s voice on the other end sounded calm and confident. As if from a distance, he heard himself answer.

“Yeah, ” he said, “Sure, I can meet you there.”

But the moment the call ended, his stomach clenched at the thought of returning to what used to be an ordinary store front. Would Olga be there, ready to cast him into a universe of unimaginable torment?

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Yet the memory of Inga’s voice egged him on, soothing his frayed nerves, until he stood at the driver’s side of his slate blue Honda Civic. Though he dared not enter the shop, he had the distinct impression that Olga was gone. Dazed, he stared transfixed at his car through normal eyes, for the first time in a week — unabashedly grateful for the buoyant, fluffy clouds reflected in its windshield.

A few hours later, Tucky winced as he squeezed himself out of the Civic, his back muscles complaining from his long hours hunched over the tablet. Out in the cool autumn air at twilight, however, the pain began to fade. The rustling of dry leaves to his left, made him turn his head. He saw Inga Gestirn leaning casually against a blue Toyota Prius, her frail body tucked into a wrinkled, fleece-lined safari jacket, and a pair of worn khakis, tucked incongruously into a pair of snake-skin cowboy boots. From her broad leather belt dangled two narrow LED flashlights.

Never big on social skills, Tucky wasted no time in greetings or a show of gratitude.

“Why here?” he asked.

Without saying a word, Inga took him by the hand and led him to the nearby opening of a deserted grotto. She stopped short and searched his eyes for understanding.

“Before we go any farther,” she said, “I have to apologize. I should have warned you.”

Tucky looked away.

“You tried,” he said. “I was just too far gone.”

Inga hung her head, then looked up at him, shading her eyes against the sunset at his back.

“The device,” she said. “You have no idea the trouble you’ve caused.”

Tucky felt a lump in his throat as he followed her into the mouth of the nearest cave.

“Didn’t mean to,” he said. “Never got so interested in anything before. Most things kinda bore me. Probably why I’ve never amounted to much.”

The elderly woman sat herself down on one of the smoother boulders that lay near the cave opening.

“Listen to me,” she said softly, “The animus can only build on what it finds in its victim. Somewhere in there is a brilliant engineer.”

She stood up and handed him one of the two LED flashlights clipped to her belt and pushed him gently into the cave. Inside, the shimmering effect of its phosphorescent walls almost made him lose his balance. Inga led him slowly down a long, narrow passageway, then into a much larger chamber, whose ceiling arched up nearly twenty-five feet. Once his eyes adjusted to the chamber, his attention was riveted on the gracefully curving rock formation just off to his right.

“Reveal,” said Inga.

Tucky’s eyes widened as the rock formation blurred and rearranged itself into a perfect likeness of the ship he had inadvertently built with Olga.

“This is the original of the one the animus helped you build out of my poor Olga’s spare parts,” said Inga, wistfully.

“You knew her?” asked Tucky.

“She was my daughter. And my prisoner,” said Inga. “Except I didn’t have the heart to strand her here with that thing. Come on, I’ll show you what you built.”

As Inga waved her other hand over a contact in the side of her ship, a curved panel opened, revealing an interior jammed with instrumentation and a short row of passenger seats. As they stepped inside, a glow of milky white light suffused the ship’s cabin. Tucky stared, open mouthed while Inga described her original mission: To deliver a deadly prisoner into exile, her only child, who had become the victim of a parasitical mentality.

 “What you experienced was only Stage One,” she explained. “If you’d followed the creature into space, it would have merged with you completely.”

Once they realized the imminent danger posed by the animus, Inga’s team had captured Olga. Surgeons acted quickly, limiting the parasite’s access to key areas of Olga’s brain. The operation, they reasoned, would leave the young woman slow-witted, but functional enough for life on a simpler world. Inga was to transport her to Earth and leave her to her fate, with the animus trapped in a mind it could no longer control. To disguise Inge and her daughter as human, they both received multiple transgenomic therapies

“But the plan didn’t work,” said Tucky softly.

“We underestimated the animus,” said Inga. “While it couldn’t operate with complete freedom, it persisted, and eventually led Olga to discover where I’d hidden my ship. Before I realized what had happened, the animus also forced Olga to steal a large portion of my spare parts supply. When my Olga retrieved the quantum integration system, the animus saw its chance.”

“It hid inside … the device … as Olga,” said Tucky.

“You’re referring to a mentallic persona the animus must have adopted,” said Inga. “She was all in your head.”

Tucky’s throat tightened.

“And the … the real Olga?” he asked

“Soon after we arrived, I took a job at the University,” said Inge. “Falsifying the necessary documentation was nothing to my ship’s AI. I purchased a home in Louisville and enabled my prisoner to lead a more or less normal human life, until the strain of harboring the animus killed her.”

“She even married Drew Flaherty,” said Tucky.

Inga’s anguished look surprised him.

“I arranged that,” said the elderly woman. “It was a mistake. With Olga out of my sight, the animus was free to spring into action. It made Olga steal my equipment and through her, it gradually uploaded itself to the tablet device. At the time, though, I thought marriage might help quiet my daughter’s restless spirit. You see, it was right after … after the incident.”

Olga, just out of her teens, was mentally unstable and even more unfamiliar with human customs than she was with her new human body. Small wonder if, late at night, she sneaked out of the house as often as possible to “socialize” — with predictable results. Inga was indignant.

“Some idiot got her pregnant,” she said, “as if a woman like that could have ever cared for a child. Besides, such a child would be unable to function well, with a mind attuned to an utterly different environment.”

Tucky ran his hands through his bright red hair, now streaked with dirt and grease from a week of neglect.

“Did the child live?” he asked

“He did,” said Inga. “And that’s when I did a terrible thing.”

Because she feared that the parasitical intellect would prey on the half-breed child and escape back into the larger universe, Inga gathered up the boy in a towel, stuffed him in a gym bag and dropped him miles away in a decrepit gas station bathroom.

“I was too ashamed to tell you when I should have,” said Inga.

Her eyes misted over. Exhausted, the two of them sat in the silence of the night, ignoring the evening chill in the swirl of emotion and memory that engulfed them.

“Think you’ll go home again,” asked Tucky, “I mean, back to your … your planet, now that the animus is dead?”

“I infected your planet with a murderous parasite,” said Inga. “The least I can do is stick around to deal with the consequences.”

“But if it’s…. ” said Tucky.

“Multi-dimensional creatures don’t die so easily,” rasped the disguised alien. “You’ve just cut off the part that protruded into this universe. Now that I’ve effectively given its central nervous system your spatio-temporal coordinates, it could come back at any time.”

“How can you fight a thing like that all on your own?” asked Tucky.

“I was hoping,” said Inga, “for some help from my grandson.”

“Really?” asked Tucky. “After all the … the trouble?”

Inga reached up and put a hand on his right shoulder.

“Right now,” she said. “You’re the only one on this world I can talk to about this menace. And you’ve even learned how to read your mother tongue, haven’t you?”

“Guess so.” said Tucky. “Kinda think there’s no going back from that.”

“Tell me honestly,” said Inga. “Do you really want to go back?”

“Maybe not,” said Tucky. “Except for Carla. Loved that girl.”

Inga put her hand on his cheek.

“I can’t help you with that,” she said. “But come on, get in the ship. If we’re going to defeat the animus, we need a better base of operation.”

“Louisville?” asked Tucky.

“Andromeda,” said Inga. “And that’s just for starters.”

His heart racing, Tucky followed her into the ship, whose main hatch she’d opened with a wave of her hand. Moments later, she’d strapped him into one of the three acceleration chairs that dominated the ship’s main chamber. Then, fists clenched, he watched as she donned a blue visor and entered a series of commands into the shimmering console before them.

At once, the ship’s hatch closed and, with a slight nudge from its inertial dampeners, it rose slightly above the floor of the cave and zoomed up and out through the grotto’s large top vent. Soon they were streaking across the sky and up into the upper atmosphere.

“Won’t the, like, the Air Force spot us?” asked Tucky.

“Oh, my dear boy,” said Inga, “I engaged the ship’s cloaking device the moment we strapped in. Human tech doesn’t stand a chance against it.”

Tucky sighed, as relief washed over his tattered consciousness.

“Guess you’re not human, then,” he said. “And me, I’m only half human. So … sorry for asking … but what do you really look like?”

Inga chuckled.

“There’s time for that later, Dear,” she said. “I’ll get our genomes restored. In your case, it will be slightly more complicated, but still necessary. It’s the only way you’ll be able to fit in with the others.”

“Sounds weird,” said Tucky, “but also kinda nice.”

“Well, to be honest, ‘nice’ isn’t how I’d describe it,” said Inga. “The process will be somewhat painful.”

“Maybe,” said Tucky. “But it sure would feel good to fit in for a change.”

Inga’s lander banked up and left, relative to Earth, and Tucky had his first glimpse of an interstellar transport. In the pale light of the moon, still visible from that distance, the compact ship bristled with sensors, transmitters and a broad, parabolic scoop. It was all the proof he needed of what he “could be.”

^^^

Mark Laporta is the author of Probability Shadow and Entropy Refraction, the first two novels in the science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, which are available at a bookstore near you, on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. He is also the author of Orbitals: Journeys to Future Worlds, a collection of short science fiction, which is available as an ebook.

Image design by Steven S. Drachman, from a photo by Michael Dziedzic / Unsplash

[Editor’s Note: Read the entire story from the beginning!]

As his eyes blinked open at sunrise on Thursday, Tucky untangled himself from a knot of sheets and discarded clothes, sat up on the edge of his cot and paused to wonder what was happening to him. Was he “following his destiny” as he planned, or was Destiny on the verge of ripping him apart? A faint glow tickled the corner of his left eye and made him glance over at his workbench, where the tablet still rested. He stood up on a pair of trembling, sore legs and stumbled over to examine it. The milky-white display grew steadily brighter as he drew near.

Like a waking dream, the character strings engraved on the components appeared in his mind with razor-sharp clarity. Without giving it a thought, he began entering them with the tablet’s odd little buttons. As he went, he followed his hunches, just as he would with the guts of a broken radio, about the order of each string. Yet as Gerd’s cuckoo-clock collection struck noon in unison, every pattern he entered so far had no effect on the glowing device.

Or so it seemed, until the tablet encircled his latest character string in a red cartouche. Tucky flinched as a brief flash of red light shot out of the reddish-brown sphere that lay on the metal shelving where Olga had tossed it the night before. Suddenly, Olga herself appeared behind him, with an arm stretched across his shoulders and a knee posed coyly between his legs.

Little by little, Olga’s whispered suggestions spelled out the language of the symbols into his ear. What she knew, she claimed, was based partly on Inga’s analysis, and partly on intuition. True, Inga’s frantic reactions could only mean she had prior knowledge of the components. But nothing Olga could intuit explained how his own grasp of “tablet-ese” had come to him so suddenly.

Tucky didn’t care. Any thought of Olga was accompanied by a persuasive surge of warm, addictive sensations that quickly soothed away every trace of Reason. She was … everything … and as a fresh set of equations streamed rapidly across the tablet, her melodious voice averred that they had their roots in a larger mathematical pattern.

Occasionally, Olga brought him a meal or a cup of coffee; otherwise his feverish eyes reflected nothing but the milky white glow of the tablet’s display. Had days passed, or weeks? The concept of time seemed to have slipped out through his ears.

Yet where was Olga now?

He looked up from the pile of loose leaf sketches and calculations that spread across his workbench, Tucky vaguely remembered the sudden flash of light that had cut her off in mid-sentence … hours before. It was as if she’d disappeared, like a mythical genii — except how could that possibly make sense? Ponder that thought as he might, it wasn’t long before that brief interlude of mental clarity faded and Tucky was once again completely absorbed in the task at hand, of which he still had only a foggy, inductive understanding.

Regardless, as daylight faded away, nothing mattered to him but the satisfaction he felt each time the reddish-brown sphere flared up in a tiny arc of red light. So it went until, at last, the larger pattern he’d sought for the last two days emerged — arising from a subtle arrangement of characters on the tablet screen.

“It’s a machine,” he croaked, his voice dry and cracked as his parched throat.

At that, Olga loomed into view, spun him around by the shoulders and pressed him close to her soft, warm body.

“What is a machine?” she asked. Tucky’s eyes widened. Where had she come from? He hadn’t heard … but the feel of Olga’s hands inside his shirt drove all wonder from his mind. His heavy eyelids drooped shut.

“Components. After they … after they fit together,” he said.

Olga broke out in a broad smile and laid his head down gently on to the workbench. Had Tucky not fallen asleep a moment later, he would have seen something to change his perspective on her completely. As it was, he slept until Friday morning. He woke only as the Samsung Galaxy buried in his jeans chimed in, with the perky ringtone Carla had chosen for him, one playful night last June. But what a coincidence that her name should appear in the caller ID.

“Carla?” his voice rasped.

“Don’t you ever go home?” asked Carla’s smoky, resonant voice. “I’ve been over to your place, like, twenty times this week to drop off the crap you left at my house.”

“Could have called….” he started to say.

“Why?” Carla snapped. “You never check your phone either. Your Aunt Inga has been calling you for days and now she’s calling me. I don’t even know how she got my number.”

Tucky sat up on the edge of his cot.

“Aunt?” asked Tucky

“Right,” said Carla. “The one you never told me about. Lying bastard. ‘I have no family,’ you said. Well you do and you … you have to call her!”

“Not … lying,” sputtered Tucky.

Carla’s voice was weary.

“I have to go. I’m leaving your stuff in front of your door,” she said. “Call your aunt and then go see a doctor. You sound terrible.”

The phone went dead. Tucky’s eyes filled with tears. If he could succeed at something, if he could just prove to her … that what? “Not crazy, not irresponsible, not emotionally withholding” didn’t add up to a perfect Zoosk profile. Besides, even if he did work out the secret of the components, how would he explain the sheer weirdness it involved — not to mention Olga.

He pursed his lips, wiped his tired eyes with the sleeve of the blue flannel shirt he’d thrown on … sometime … and checked his phone for voicemails from “Aunt Inga.” There were eight of them. He chose one at random, put it on speakerphone, and sat motionless as the elderly woman’s voice echoed through the clutter around him. Listening through the cloud of his obsession with Olga, all he could grasp was the urgency in the Inga’s voice.

The word “device,” figured into Inga’s message in a way he also didn’t understand. Yet one phrase cut through the dense fog that enveloped his mind.

“It may present itself as a persona … “

Inga’s voice had trembled on the last word and it was this that lodged itself most firmly in Tucky’s mind. Even though, he’d understood very little of what he’d heard, the urgency of Inga’s messages continued to haunt him. Maybe if he tried another one of her voicemails. Again, the old woman’s voice echoed in his ears, as he shuffled over to his cot.

” … but the energy requirements are too great to be sustained indefinitely. Periodically, it must recharge.”

As he passed the metal shelving on his left, Tucky paused to pick up the reddish brown sphere.

” … at those moments, the animus will withdraw into the device and that’s when it’s vulnerable … “

What was the old buzzard talking about? He’d have to ask Olga when she returned. For the moment, he settled back down on a cracked, oak bar stool near his workbench, preoccupied with discovering the next step.

” … I suggest you use a blunt object … “

Enough, He had to think. The text crawling across the tablet was clear. He cupped the reddish-brown sphere in one hand and twisted its top half gently to the left, as he’d seen Olga do, until the red light emanating from it narrowed into a focused beam. Next, he aimed this new stream light at the tallest of the sculptures he’d cobbled together out of the components, which he now knew by name and function. Immediately, a holographic image appeared to the right of sculpture. It was an image Tucky recognized as one of his other sculptures, one lying halfway toward the door to the shopfront.

Following a hunch, he re-aimed the sphere’s pale light at that corresponding sculpture, and felt his face curl up into a smile. The holographic image that appeared next to the second sculpture was an exact likeness of the first. And no sooner had the second hologram appeared, than the second sculpture floated into the back room and aligned itself with the first sculpture. Elated, Tucky turned the sphere this way and that, catching each of the sculptures in its light and clicking his tongue gleefully at each new image.

Now Tucky spun around on his heels, working feverishly to align the sculptures and watching as they welded themselves together with astonishing precision. Hours passed, and at length Tucky marveled at the intricate, graceful framework that now rose from the floor and took up nearly all available space in the back room. All along, he’d assumed the components would add up to a new kind of computer or maybe even a transmat device, like the one he’d seen in the movies. But from one angle, he thought, its shape suggested an aircraft of some kind. What, he wondered, was he supposed to do with that?

(To be continued, in Episode 6)

^^^

Mark Laporta is the author of Probability Shadow and Entropy Refraction, the first two novels in the science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, which are available at a bookstore near you, on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. He is also the author of Orbitals: Journeys to Future Worlds, a collection of short science fiction, which is available as an ebook.

Design by Steven S. Drachman from an image by xusenru / Pixabay

[Editor’s Note: Read the entire story from the beginning!]

On his way home, Tucky stopped off for a pepperoni pie at Snappy Tomato. He figured he’d zone out with a six pack of Nitro Porter and a Hobbit move. As a plan for the evening, it was a poor substitute for what he really wanted after breaking up with Carla: a chance to talk out his hurt feelings with Mom or Dad.

Trouble was, he’d never met either of them. His name was a mishmash of data from the police report to Social Services: They’d found him inside a gas station washroom along Route 54 in Calloway County, Kentucky — wrapped in a towel and stuffed into a gym bag. “Tucky Calloway” was supposed to be a temporary moniker. But when years passed and no lonely couple felt lonely enough for the sullen, cranky boy, his childhood ran out at a series of three foster homes — and he was stuck with a GPS location for an identity.

His years since high school had teetered between desperate loneliness and an uncomfortable sense of belonging with a collection of taunting, domineering “friends.” As a consequence, his meager support network consisted most reliably of Gerd’s brother, Lukas Wrangel, the last and least toxic of his foster parents. Once he dropped out of community college, Tucky’s job at Gerd’s repair shop was the closest thing to a safe landing he could have hoped for.

Gerd himself, while not exactly paternal, had been generous enough to let Tucky live rent-free above his garage. “Free,” that is, at the cost of putting up with Gerd’s erratic swings between simmering rage and vodka-drenched sentimentality. But from Gerd’s perspective, Tucky was his cash cow. Word of mouth about the shy young man’s ingenious, reliable repairs had expanded the shop’s customer base considerably. In response, Tucky’s pay went up a few dollars above minimum wage — but that also earned him more nagging scrutiny, on Gerd’s “bad days.”

So, in a moment of searing grief, Tucky had no one to confide in. Lukas and Lola, his staunchly Christian foster mother, had never warmed up to Carla — not to mention everything she implied. All things considered, the idea of curling up with beer and comfort food was the only brand of therapy within reach. Combined with a film about triumphing over impossible odds, they seemed a more appealing option than punching his fists though his apartment’s one-quarter-inch sheetrock walls.

That is, until he remembered the box of junk back at Wrangel Repair & Thrift, especially that haunting, weird tablet. In fact, once the tablet was back in his thoughts, it refused to leave him in peace. But Tucky wasn’t ready to give up his sulk so fast. Instead, he made a half-hearted attempt to straighten up the scene of his final shouting match with Carla the day before. The match, that is, that immediately preceded the plate of spaghetti she threw at his head and the sound of her Adidas pounding down the rickety exterior stairs that led up to his apartment over Gerd’s garage.

There was pasta everywhere, but after an unusual effort of the will, he managed to get the last of it off the ugly, red Scotch plaid curtains on his living room windows. Beyond that, his energies gave out in a brief fit of crying over the girl he figured was probably his last chance for happiness. Yet on his way to the kitchen with a dustpan full of spaghetti, he had to wonder if his definition of happiness had any basis in any reality he could hope to inhabit.

All at once, a set of car lights that flashed by, on the road running past Gerd’s squat home, and made Tucky glance out his kitchen window. The car was going nowhere in particular, but what really caught his eye was the bright array of twinkling stars that stood out against the cloudless early fall sky. As he stood, fascinated by their distant glow, the heartsick twenty-something felt his spirits lift an inch or two.

Maybe there’s a better life out there somewhere, he allowed himself to think.

Then again, he still had to get through Monday night. With a sigh, Tucky shuffled back into his living room and plopped down on his brown corduroy upholstered couch. He snapped open a Nitro, flung his legs out on his scratched, pseudo-colonial coffee table and let his eyes flutter shut. A millisecond later, the bronze tablet appeared, emblazoned on his eyelids. Across its glowing milky-white screen, a stream of unfamiliar characters flowed past at a leisurely pace. Did they add up to sentences in code? Or was this some kind of Math he’d never heard of?

“Pretty lame for a guy with ‘so much potential’,” he mumbled.

Mr. Nagy, his Electrical Technology teacher at Cole Community College, had said he could be an electrical engineer. Carla had insisted that he could be a computer genius. But as Tucky looked around his messy living room, splattered with bootleg DVDs, discarded take-out cartons and cracked circuit boards, it seemed pretty clear that this was all he “could be.” Being anything else meant locking himself up in a classroom with nothing to do but listen — and he knew himself too well. Even if he took Mr. Nagy up on his offer to tutor him one-on-one, nights and weekends, “to work around his condition,” Tucky knew he’d just get bored again. His condition was this. No sense pretending he could change.

“Sorry guys,” he said to DVD player across the room. He sucked back some Nitro and took a second stab at relaxing his eyes.

There it was again! The glowing tablet floated behind his eyelids. He swung his feet onto his Navy-blue plush carpet, grabbed his car keys, pushed the door open and headed downstairs to the pavement. He fired up the Civic and sped off into the early evening, out onto the highway and over to the center of town.

But as he pulled up to the curb in front of Gerd’s shop, he almost cracked the taillights on the car parked in front of him. Why, on God’s green Earth, were three more large boxes piled up on the shop’s stoop? With the motor still running, Tucky crawled out the passenger side and jogged over to read the note attached to the top box.

Found these buried under the begonias this morning.

Starting to think my Olga was out of her head.

In the glare of his headlights, he felt his stomach tighten. The choice the components offered him was intriguing. He could smash the tablet and go back to moping over Carla — or try to work out Olga’s secret and maybe lift himself out of his WD-40-soaked rut. And yet … would life outside of that rut lead to more opportunity or deeper disappointment?

Already kinda close to the bottom, he told himself.

Tucky looked up again at the stars he’d seen from his window, which shone even brighter in the crisp night air. What, he wondered, was the risk? He rushed back to shut off the Civic, fished his shop keys out of his pocket and opened the top box. Nestled into a heap of identical components, one stood out: a reddish-brown sphere, offset by the same milky-white glow he’d seen on the tablet’s screen. As he let himself into the shop, and dragged the three boxes across the threshold, Tucky had to admit he’d never felt so excited — except maybe for that time with Carla out by Nolin Lake.

(To be continued, in Episode 3)

^^^

Mark Laporta is the author of Probability Shadow and Entropy Refraction, the first two novels in the science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, which are available at a bookstore near you, on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. He is also the author of Orbitals: Journeys to Future Worlds, a collection of short science fiction, which is available as an ebook.

Design from an original photograph by Mindaugus Victus

Behind the mud-splattered windows at the back of Wrangel Repair & Thrift, Tucky Calloway hunched over a busted radio. As usual, his workbench, an eight by five sheet of half-inch plywood slapped across two dinged-up, yellow sawhorses, was crammed with repair jobs — enough to keep him chained to it for weeks. That was a good thing. Now that Carla had walked out, the only place he’d rather be was flat on his back, asleep.

Lean and lanky, Tucky stood six-foot-two and, despite a lifetime of moodiness, managed to shamble around the back room with an unaffected grace that many a dancer might envy. His fire engine red hair, that had lately straggled down to shoulder-length, gave him the air of a Medieval wizard. It was an effect compounded by a pair of deep-set blue eyes that stared out at the world with a quizzical mix of insecurity and self-confidence.

Most days, Tucky worked until his long, calloused fingers ached. He had a knack for fixing anything with wires hanging out of it, and a generalized obsession with tinkering. A “Shop” course in high school and six months at Cole Community College had helped him pick up the basics. The rest he’d learned by riffling through the hundreds of back issues of Nuts & Volts and Popular Mechanics left behind by a disgruntled former employee. A dusty pile of magazines from the 1990s teetered on the brink of collapse, mere inches away from his left foot.

Just have to … listen to it, he told himself about the clock-radio in pieces on his workbench.

That’s how he usually spent the early morning hours, waiting for a device to tell him what it needed to revive. But this morning was different. Gerd Wrangel was out inspecting an estate sale seventy-five miles away in Cynthiana, and Tucky had the disagreeable task of dealing with his customers. At the moment, one of them was jamming on the shopfront counter bell like a Heavy Metal drummer.

Tucky switched off his soldering iron, wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans and scuffed his Timberlands out of his dark warren into the shop’s bright main room. A short, stocky man in his early sixties glared at him from behind the shop’s glass display case, in which a tempting array of refurbished toasters and CD players beckoned to savvy bargain hunters. With the morning sun bouncing off his shiny, bald head, the man looked like the personification of Hopping Mad. The blue Bic pen, parked behind his right ear, suggested a life-long intolerance for inefficiency. As Tucky walked in, the older man hefted a large supermarket box, bearing the blue, Kroger logo, up onto the shop’s main countertop.

“Took you long enough,” he said. “You got a girl back there?”

Tucky’s mouth curled up into a crooked smile.

“In your dreams, maybe,” he said.

He peered into the box, then reached for the printed intake pad that Gerd always used when a new “shipment” arrived. Though Tucky was itching to get back to work, the contents of the box had already aroused his curiosity — a rare event in his life. And no wonder. The carton originally intended for canned peas, was filled to the brim with a wide assortment of truly odd electronic components.

Tucky started asking the standard questions that Gerd had outlined on the sheet, but the more the bald man spoke, the more Tucky wanted to know. Turns out, the cantankerous older man was a widower who’d finally decided to clean out his deceased wife’s closets.

“Don’t ask me what they’re for,” said the widower. “Olga had all kinds of junk stowed away that I never knew about.”

Tucky ignored him, already preoccupied with the contents of the box, none of which he could identify. In fact, once he got his hands on a couple of pieces, it was hard to set them down again. But the shiny bald head on the other side of the counter drummed an insistent rhythm into the slightly cracked glass counter.

“Can you give me something for them or not?” he asked.

“Gerd,” said Tucky without looking up, “… he’ll have to call you after he’s looked these over. You have a phone?”

Drew muttered under his breath, but grabbed the Bic pen and scratched out an address and phone number on the back of one of Gerd’s dusty business cards. Tucky watched absently as the older man repositioned the pen and shuffled his stooped frame out to the sidewalk that ran along Highland Avenue. A second later, Tucky returned to the back room, with his eyes glued to the flat, bronze rectangle that rested at the bottom of the box. He set the box down on his bench, reached in and pulled the odd-looking thing out with trembling hands.

In the angled September sunlight that streamed in through the shop’s cracked windows, he could see it was a weird kind of tablet. At first, it looked as if a hobbyist had tried to build a cheap knock-off of an iPad. But a closer look revealed several quirky details. For starters, he’d never seen a tablet dotted with triangular buttons. Plus, the more he stared at it, the more the milky-white glow of it screen seemed to seep into his mind. It was almost as if he could feel the screen warming the inside of his skull.

He drew his breath through his front teeth and grabbed for the business card that his grouchy customer had left for him. “Drew Flaherty,” read the scrawled name. The address was only a 20-minute drive away.

Tucky glanced at the row of thirteen, perfectly synchronized clocks, hung with care along the south wall of the shop and gathered it was already 4:00 PM. Just how long, he wondered, had he been fiddling with the tablet?

Gotta get these parts for myself, he decided.

With Gerd out of town and business slow, he figured he might as well drive over now and pay the widower right away. Assuming, that is, he could get his pockmarked, Honda Civic started. At twelve years old, the slate blue used car, whose maintenance Tucky could barely afford, was one more thin thread connecting him to his sanity. Without a car … no, he didn’t even want to think about how awful his life would be.

As he drove out toward Worthville, Tucky felt his shoulders relax and his mind clear, the farther he got from the shop and the … the box. But clarity had its drawbacks, for his thoughts now flooded with Carla’s face, Carla’s voice, Carla’s sundress draped over the foot of his bed.

Good thing the old man had come along, he decided. He needed some way to take his mind off his abject misery. Though most people would agree that, at age twenty-four, one bad break-up didn’t mean that Tucky’s life was over, he wasn’t convinced. That very morning, his mind had revolved around a nauseating recurrent dream — the one where he jumped into the Ohio River and was chewed up by tiny sharks. But ever since … since the box … it felt like the dream was fading from memory. He had a mission now, didn’t he? He had to focus.

So as he pulled up to a small house along Route 467, Tucky squeezed his eyes tight and, at least for now, pushed Carla out of his mind. He opened his eyes again and studied the white, slate-roofed home with the mud-brown fencing around a narrow porch. Its oversized dormer window peeked out at him like a warning beacon or a sentinel. Or so it seemed, until he realized that this was just one of a cluster of buildings that faced the railroad tracks. It was, in other words, as reassuringly normal as it could possibly be. Why, he wondered, did it make the pit of his stomach tie up in knots? He climbed out of his Civic and crunched up the gravel driveway to the front porch, his legs trembling all the way. But with the sun already starting its lazy slouch towards the horizon, there was nothing for it but to rap on the screen door frame.

No answer. Normally, that would have been enough to discourage Tucky. But a new impetus, a force he’d never felt before, emboldened him to push his way through the front door into a small entryway. To his left, an interior door opened up to a compact kitchen. There sat Drew Flaherty, sound asleep at the kitchen table, a glass of red wine still clutched in one hand. Relief washed over Tucky as he tiptoed backwards and prepared to turn around. No use waking the old guy.

That is, until the broad heel of his Timberlands came down hard on the paws of Flaherty’s yellow Tom cat. The screeching and hollering that followed took quite a few minutes to settle down — until Tucky could convince the old man that he’d only come to pay for the components.

“Only fifteen bucks?” asked Drew.

“Twenty,” said Tucky. The way he figured it, he’d be buying one less movie ticket a week from now on. Later, based on his conversation with the widower, he realized he could probably have gotten away with less. Yet as the younger man pulled the Civic away from curbside, what stuck in his mind wasn’t the money.

“Haven’t been able to sleep since I dragged that damn box out of the closet.” Drew had told him. “Kept hearing a voice, a little like Olga’s … except it was talking some kind of gibberish.”

(To be continued, in Episode 2)

^^^

Mark Laporta is the author of Probability Shadow and Entropy Refraction, the first two novels in the science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, which are available at a bookstore near you, on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. He is also the author of Orbitals: Journeys to Future Worlds, a collection of short science fiction, which is available as an ebook.

TITLE IMAGE BY JULIUSH/PIXABAY; INTERIOR DESIGN BY STEVEN S. DRACHMAN FROM AN IMAGE BY UMBERTO SHAW/PEXELS

The envelope was addressed in a bold sprawling hand that barely left room for the seventy-five cent special delivery stamp in the upper right hand corner. It was a nice stamp—a blue one commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Harvey’s first landing on Mars. Carl Keating tore it open. Inside was a single sheet of good paper, typewritten on one side. The message read:

Dear Mr. Keating;
Must see you at once.
Norman Hamlin

He’d barely slid the letter back in its wrapper when the desk phone rang. Automatically he pushed the view-plate to a respectful fifteen inches and threw in the video. The screen swirled for a moment in a milky blur, then abruptly a man’s head and shoulders jumped into focus. He was a lean, angular-faced man, with thin shoulders and thinner lips, which at the moment were set in a Lincolnish smile.

“I’m Dr. Hamlin,” the face in the screen announced. “You got my letter?”

Carl nodded. “I have your letter doctor, but I’m afraid you have the wrong man. I can’t imagine what you’d want to see ME about.”

The image on the screen expanded as Norman Hamlin leaned toward the view-plate. “You are Major Carl Keating, retired?” the mouth asked.

Carl pushed the instrument back hoping the other man would do the same. “Retired as of last Tuesday,” he said, “at the tender age of thirty-six. What’s on your mind, doctor?”

The mouth got bigger till it filled the entire screen. “Major Keating, would it be possible for you to come out to Long Island tonight?”

“It would not!”

“Please it’s….”

“Dr. Hamlin,” Carl said not bothering to keep the annoyance out of his voice, “in the first place I don’t even know who you are; in the second place I’m packing for a vacation in Paris; and in the third place if there’s anything I detest, it’s talking down someone’s throat. Now if you don’t mind….”

“Wait!” The image on the screen diminished, till over the narrow shoulders Carl could make out a book-lined study, and beyond that a sunken living room. “It’s important—very important.”

“So’s my vacation.”

“Suppose I were to make it worth while to postpone your vacation?”

“I’m afraid my while is worth more than you could offer,” Keating said bluntly.

“I can offer five thousand dollars,” Norman Hamlin said. “It’s yours just for coming out to Wading River tonight and listening to what I have to say.”

“You mean you’ll pay five thousand dollars just for the privilege of talking to me?”

Hamlin nodded. “You listen to what I tell you. Then, if you aren’t interested, you pick up your five thousand and leave. It’s as easy as that.”

Keating reached across the desk and scanned the envelope. “I have the address,” he said. “I’ll be right out.”

It was the peak of the rush hour when he left the apartment. Overhead, a congested swarm of copter traffic buzzed like an angry beehive. A block away was a monorail kiosk. Ever conscious of the strange feel of his new civvies, Keating entered it and boarded a Huntington express. From there it was only ten minutes to Wading River by copter-cab. Dr. Hamlin had left the lawn lights burning, and even before he’d paid his fare, was standing at his elbow. He extended a hand in greeting. “You made good time,” he said.

Keating gripped the other man’s hand. “You made a good offer.”

Hamlin gestured him through an opening in the dura-glass ell of the house. The room was a library, the same one he’d seen over Hamlin’s shoulder during the phone conversation. In the center of the book-bordered room was a rectangular table. A man sat at the head of it.

“Sit down,” the man said.

Carl sat down. The man at the head of the table was robust, almost to the point of flabbiness. He was probably in his late twenties, but the pink flush on his cheekbones and a pair of broad-arched eyebrows gave him a mannequin appearance.

“This is Mr. Stewart Ferguson,” Dr. Hamlin announced.

“Not THE Mr. Stewart Ferguson?”

“I take it then you’ve heard of him?”

Carl studied the man whimsically. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” he said. “All the way from here to Mars and back I’ve heard of him.”

Stewart Ferguson lit a cigarette. “Am I to understand, Mr. Keating, that you don’t approve of my so-called behavior?”

Carl shrugged. “Who am I to comment on your behavior? If I had your money I’d probably act the same way you do. Who doesn’t want to sleep with a video actress?”

Dr. Hamlin coughed. “There are times when perhaps the newspapers have exaggerated Mr. Ferguson’s escapades. Furthermore, I hardly think his private life is any concern of ours.”

“I’m not concerned,” Carl said. “If I’m being paid five thousand dollars to listen to an evening’s chatter I’d as soon listen to Ferguson’s autobiography as anything else … might even come down on my price a bit.”

Stewart Ferguson dug into his coat pocket and came up with a sheaf of bills. He threw them across the table. “That takes care of our agreement,” he said, “now suppose we get down to the business you’re being paid to listen to.”

Carl picked up the bills and rapped them across his knuckles. For just a moment he toyed with the idea of throwing them back in the playboy’s face. He didn’t. Not only was five thousand dollars a lot of money, but his curiosity was aroused. “I’m listening,” he said.

Norman Hamlin braced his bony elbows on the table and leaned toward him. “Mr. Keating, in the course of the three trips you made to Mars with the military, what was it that stood out foremost in your mind?”

“Men’s emotions vary,” Carl said carefully. “An architect would probably admire the beauty of the Martian cities, while a gourmet would savor the taste of candied encoms. Probably the thing that impressed me most was the friendliness of the people.”

Hamlin drummed his fingers on the table. “I see,” he said. “You’d say, then, it was a reasonably nice place to live?”

“Reasonably nice,” Carl agreed. “Certainly nicer than the science-fiction writers had pictured it.”

“Better than Earth?”

Carl shook his head. “Not as far as I’m concerned. My tastes run to sandy beaches and women with real eyelashes. That’s just my personal opinion you understand. There’s almost eighty-thousand people who disagree with me—I believe that was the latest migration figures.”

Hamlin thumped his pipe against the edge of the table. “I understand you’ve just returned from Venus, Mr. Keating. Can you give us a short briefing concerning your reactions to that planet?”

Carl eyed the man warily. “I’ll be as brief as possible. There’s been four landings on Venus in almost forty years. All these have been made by the military. That to me is a pretty substantial indication that no one would go there unless they were ordered to!”

Hamlin smiled. “I didn’t mean quite as brief as that, Mr. Keating. I had rather hoped you’d be a little more explicit.”

Carl frowned. “I find it a bit hard to understand just what you’re driving at Dr. Hamlin. After all, there’s been over a hundred books written on the subject. What can I add to the books? Maybe I could cram in a few more ghastly adjectives, but even then it wouldn’t explain what the place was really like. You’d have to go there to find that out.

“How can you explain to someone sitting in a comfortable drawing room, the terrors of plodding through a swamp, knee deep in green fog, and wondering when a forty foot reptile is going to sink its teeth into your leg. How can you explain the sheer mental fatigue of waiting for a needle-nosed scorpion to puncture your space jumper, knowing that the atmosphere right on the other side of your face-plate can kill you in thirty seconds. How do you explain an atmosphere of chlorine and ammonia for that matter—or a color. I say purple-brown to you and it don’t mean a thing. But look at the angry purple-brown landscape of Venus for two years like I did and you’d know what I mean.

“It’s a primitive planet, Dr. Hamlin. Right now, according to the geologists, Venus is just like the earth was ten million years ago. Life is forming on it—primitive life. Take the chowls, for example—you see replicas of them in every department store window. They look a little like teddy-bears, especially when they walk. Still they have ten fingers and ten toes. Archeologists tell us they’re humanoid. Yet only half-a-million years ago they crawled out of the oceans. Maybe in another two million years they’ll be living in houses instead of thatched hovels and pointing guns at people instead of running like a star-bound flame-buggy every time they hear a noise. But right now they’re scared. They’re out of their natural element and they’re scared, the same way our own Neanderthal man was scared before he found out how to fashion a rock-hammer.”

Dr. Hamlin lit his pipe. “You’re quite sure then, Mr. Keating, that man will never be able to live there?”

“Live there! Man can’t even breathe there! There’s less than one tenth of one percent oxygen in the air.”

Dr. Hamlin pressed his fingertips together. “Mr. Keating,” he said, “just how much do you know about the three men who were lost on the first Venus expedition?”

“Only what’s in the history books,” Carl said. “It’s more or less of a legend, how Edgerton, Rhind, and Mitchell, were separated from the main party and never seen again.”

“Died contributing to man’s conquest of space,” Ferguson said with mock drama.

“It wasn’t a pleasant death,” Carl said quickly. “I’d bet on that.”

“Mr. Keating,” Hamlin said, “do you have any ideas as to just why these three men should have disappeared at this time?”

Carl shook his head. “Could have been anything, I guess. They could have got lost and ran out of oxygen. They could have gotten snake bit. I wouldn’t know. The whole thing happened before I was born.”

II

Dr. Hamlin got up. “No, there was more to it than that. In spite of the fact that it happened almost forty years ago, I happen to know that the situation didn’t occur exactly as the history books would have you believe. The army, it is true covered up for them and made them heroes, but Edgerton, Mitchell, and Rhind, in reality, took off on their own. They took off without orders or permission, just a few hours before take-off-time, with nothing except a six week supply of oxygen, a portable air-blister, and a few supplies.”

Carl studied the man’s face. The story was true. In his cadet days, old spacemen had spilled the story too many times for him to doubt its authenticity. “Suppose you tell me what all this is getting at?” he hedged.

Hamlin crossed the room. From a desk drawer he removed a palm-sized photo-cartridge and inserted it in the video adaptor. The room lights dimmed as the three dimensional screen brightened, dancing in a kaleidoscope of color. The colors merged.

He was staring into a vivid reproduction of a Venusian landscape. The picture had been taken from a small hill. Below was the violet-brown monotony of a saroo forest, visible only in small islands, where the roof of the trees stabbed out from the swirling green fog. And beyond that, almost lost in the haze, was the outline of a pair of reddish-brown spires, that reared out of the jungle, rising, till they were lost in the ever present layer of upper clouds that shrouded the planet. It was an ugly scene—ugly, yet strangely beautiful.

The camera swiveled in a 180° arc. They were looking up the hill now—looking up to where the hill tore itself loose from the green-fog level, rising for perhaps half a mile, then disappearing in the white ocean overhead. Halfway up the hill was a cluster of flare trees, their purple-brown leaves drooping in the ammonia-soaked air, and underneath the trees, a house—not the blister-type oxygen tents used by the military, or the thatched hovels of the chowls, but a real earth-style house with a peaked roof and pillar supported porch. Abruptly, the picture widened into a sharp closeup, revealing an open doorway. A man—an earthman—stood framed in the threshold. He was a clean-shaven man, probably in his early twenties. Two other men slightly older, lolled in a pair of rustic chairs set on the open veranda. Apparently none of the men were aware of the camera that recorded their every move.

Carl was aware of his hands gripping the chair arms. Except for the weird backdrop of flare trees and raton vines that flanked the house, he might have been looking at a peaceful summer resort in the Canadian Rockies. But it wasn’t an earth picture. These men were on Venus lolling about in their shirt sleeves and breathing in the atmosphere of chlorine and ammonia that was sure to kill a man in thirty seconds!

It was trick photography. It had to be. Quickly, he flicked a look at Dr. Hamlin, then looked back at the screen. One of the men was elbowing himself out of the chair now. He walked to the edge of the porch railing and stared directly into the camera. There was something vaguely familiar about the man—about all the men.

Suddenly, Carl tensed forward on the edge of the chair, conscious of a cold icicle of movement that snaked the length of his spine. The picture on the screen flicked out, abruptly. The room lights were on again, and Stewart Ferguson was studying him with detached insolence.

“Well?” Ferguson asked.

Carl ignored him, and turned to Norman Hamlin. “Did I see what I think I saw?” he asked.

Hamlin nodded.

“But those men!”

“You recognized them?”

Carl swallowed, hard. The highball he’d had three hours before churned up in his throat. “Of course I recognize them,” he said thickly. “They’ve been commemorated on postage stamps and cut in stone at every spaceport in the country. But they’re dead! Been dead for forty years!”

Hamlin turned up his palms. “You saw the pictures,” he said evenly.

“Possibly the military has been deceiving us for forty years,” Ferguson drawled. “Maybe they only made up that story about the poisonous atmosphere.”

Keating felt a hot flush rise to the back of his neck. “That’s not true,” he said with obvious restraint. “I was there—for two long years I was on Venus, and it’s bad, every bit as bad as the army says it is. You’d have to smell the stuff yourself to know what I really mean. It’s so bad that even after you drop your jumper in the airlock and shower, the stuff follows you inside and stinks the ship up from here to Pluto and back again. The army’s not lying. Not about that they’re not!”

“How do you account for the photos then?”

“I don’t know,” Carl said wearily. “All I know is that for forty years, no man….” He stopped suddenly, as all at once the full enormity of the situation dawned on him. Those men on the screen. He’d recognized them of course from their pictures. But how about those pictures? The pictures he’d seen of Edgerton, Mitchell, and Rhind, were old pictures…. Pictures taken almost forty years ago!

As if from far away, Hamlin’s voice was droning in his ears. “Perhaps it’s not quite as ridiculous as you may think, Mr. Keating. There’s a widely recognized theory that the very air which gives us life, also gives us death. In fact, one of the chief reasons for the high migration to Mars is the fact that man’s life expectancy on that planet is almost thirty percent greater than on our own. Now let’s suppose that the three men who deserted the first Venus expedition had in some way found a way to breathe the air of that planet. Is it so inconceivable that the atmospheric content might be conducive to extremely high longevity—perhaps even immortality?”

Carl wanted to say something—anything. “When—when were these pictures taken?” he finally managed.

“Just a little over four months ago.”

The voice had an oddly nostalgic ring to it. Carl turned. The man had apparently entered the room unnoticed. He was a big block-shouldered man, with brown eyes and a mat of inky-black hair that all but covered a low sloping forehead. He could have passed for a cargo hand at the Montauk Spaceport, except that Carl knew different.

“No need to introduce myself, is there?” the man said.

Carl shook his head. To Hamlin he said: “Paul Spero just got back from Venus too. We were discharged together—as if you didn’t know.”

“You should have stuck around Keating,” Spero said. “Right after you left, I tied in with a three-day party. You missed out on a good time.”

“I’ll bet,” Carl said. “I take it that you were the one who brought back the pictures?”

Spero forced a grin that didn’t quite make the width of his mouth. “That’s right. While you and the rest of the crew were entertaining yourselves collecting fossils I did some research on my own.”

“Did it ever occur to you that the military might want these pictures?” Carl asked.

The other man made a noise with his nose. “Just what did the military ever do for me, Keating?” he asked “Fifteen years I spent as a crewman on every flame-buggy from here to Titan and back, and after all that, I get pensioned off a miserable second lieutenant.”

“You’ll have to admit,” Carl said, “there were times when your conduct fell something short of exemplary.”

Spero tossed him a sloppy salute. “Yes, Major,” he said with mock formality. Abruptly he strode over to where Carl was standing. “I don’t think you quite get it yet, Keating,” he said thickly. “Try using your imagination. Forget about the griping we did when we were stationed there. It’s different now. Edgerton, Mitchell and Rhind have found a way to breathe, and the secret of breathing is also the secret of immortality. Suppose I’d been sucker enough to turn this information over to the high brass? Inside of half-an-hour, those men would have been interrogated. Inside of a week, the information would have been radioed back to Terra. And by now, every one on this earth and his great maiden aunt would be selling their soul to get passage to Venus. And where do you think all this would leave us Keating? I’ll tell you where … we’d be right here sweating out a priority list long enough to stretch from here to Pluto and back!”

Carl studied the man’s face. “I take it then you didn’t talk to these men when you took the pictures?”

Spero shook his head. “No,” he said carefully. “At first I had all I could do to keep from running up to them, but then I figured that if they saw me, they’d know there was a spaceship on the planet. All kinds of things went through my head; one of them was that maybe they were sick of Venus and would try to make contact with the ship and spill their story. In the end, I just hid behind a clump of saroo trees and took the pictures.”

Carl let his gaze wander about the room. He had to think. Then, almost as if it had been prearranged, he found himself looking into a full-length mirror on the far wall. The reflection he saw wasn’t old—the hair, while slightly lighter at the temples, was still for the most part dark-brown. He had a good build too, and except for a few creases radiating from the corners of his eyes, his skin had the smooth sort of thickness that many men in their middle-thirties would have envied. He’d kept himself well. It would probably be fifteen or twenty years yet before the almost invisible lines in his cheeks and forehead would begin to widen into deep grooves. But it would happen. It would….

And it didn’t have to.

He knew what the proposition was now. He turned to Dr. Hamlin. “Let’s see if I have it figured,” he said. “You want to go to Venus and look for this fountain of youth. Ferguson’s financing the trip, and Spero is the Ponce de Leon who knows where to look. All you need is a pilot. Right?”

“Think it over carefully, Mr. Keating,” Hamlin said. “Don’t be hasty in your answer.”

Spero too had noticed the note of rejection in his voice. “You’d better grab the chance, Keating,” he said. “Right now I’ll admit I don’t like Venus anymore than you. But we’re going to change all that. Right after the migration starts there’ll be cities, and parks and railroads. And we’ll be the ones responsible for all of it. We’ll be heroes—not just for ten or twenty years, but forever!”

“Did I hear someone say forever?”

The voice had a resonant, almost musical pitch to it. It was deep and throaty, more like an adolescent boy’s voice than a woman’s. She was standing at the arched entrance to the library, one hand balanced on the jade statue flanking the threshold. She had finespun taffy-blonde hair and a complexion to match. She wore a gray-green krylon dress, the same color as her eyes. It looked good on her. A space jumper would have looked equally well.

“I don’t believe you’ve met my daughter,” Dr. Hamlin said. “Diane, this is Mr. Keating.”

Diane crossed the room. The pressure of her fingers was quick, and warm and suggestive. “Hello, Mr. Keating,” she said.

Carl was aware of mumbling something polite. Across the room, Stewart Ferguson had derricked himself out of the chair. Spero remained seated, caressing the girl with his sultry brown eyes.

Diane flicked an imaginary wisp of hair back from behind her ear. “Have you decided to join us, Mr. Keating?” she said.

“Us?”

She searched his face. “Why, yes. Didn’t Dad tell you there’d be five of us. After all, who’d want a slice of immortality more than a woman.”

“Immortality for a goddess,” Ferguson said blandly.

The soft, red mouth twitched almost imperceptibly. Then the brief look of annoyance was gone. “You will come, won’t you?” she said.

Keating avoided her eyes. Again he found his gaze wandering to the wall mirror; looking at his own face, coarse and ruddy looking against Diane’s soft white shoulder.

“Count me in,” he said quietly.

III

Keating opened his eyes slowly, dimly aware of the familiar throbbing headache and a dull racking pain around the chest. Hazy-looking behind a galaxy of dancing spots was the instrument panel. He shook his head sideways—hard. The spots dissolved and the big panel board jumped into focus. The ship was two hundred miles above the Montauk Spaceport. He flicked a glance over his shoulder, half expecting to see the familiar blue uniforms of his fellow crewmates. Instead he saw three men and a girl—a girl with long shapely legs and taffy-blonde hair.

So it was true then. It hadn’t been a dream after all.

After the passengers began to stir, he turned. “Have a nice sleep?” he asked.

Diane shot him a pale smile.

Stewart Ferguson pretended to applaud. “Splendid Captain,” he said contemptuously. “A momentous speech for a momentous occasion. Come, say something more for the history books!”

There was an awkward silence. Then Spero guffawed. Carl bit off the angry reply that jumped to his lips. “All right, I will,” he said. “How about someone brewing a pot of coffee?”

Diane got up and disappeared into the galley. Minutes later, she returned with a tray of containers. She stopped momentarily when Spero, leaning against one of the ports at the end of the companionway, said something to her, then abruptly, she quickened her pace. When she handed Carl the coffee her face was a deep scarlet.

Carl Keating stared vacantly out of the blister window watching the fleecy-white rim of the earth roll up toward them. The trip, less than one hour old, was already a hotbed of smoldering emotions. Worst of all, was the fact that things were almost sure to get worse before they got better. Under the best of conditions, space does strange things to individuals cramped together in the confines of a ship. Army records are crammed full of case histories where men, failing to adjust themselves to existing conditions, have reacted in ways which are probably best left in the files. But military men are schooled and conditioned for space, and while complete and mutual understanding seldom exists, there is usually, even as there was between Spero and himself, an unwritten live-and-let-live policy among crew members.

But they weren’t in the army anymore, and no one seemed more aware of it than Paul Spero. Never a model officer, Spero in his new-found freedom, had become almost unbearably obnoxious. Nor could he expect any cooperation from Stewart Ferguson. He could handle him, he hoped. All of which brought him to the big question. What about Diane?

It was probably a paradox that while the more unsavory military case histories were due to men being without women, the proximity of a long-legged taffy-blonde in this case was a factor more conducive to mutiny than harmony.

And curiously enough, it was Diane Hamlin herself, who came up with at least part of the answer. She was smart—whether or not she’d been around was a question to ponder over while staring into the star-studded blackness beyond the blister ports. But one thing was certain: the girl had an almost uncanny knowledge of the working’s of men’s minds, an insight of psychology which she applied diplomatically if not ruthlessly to all aboard.

With just the right amount of good-natured tolerance she either ignored or subtly evaded the bluntly-pointed remarks of Stewart Ferguson and deftly sidestepped the impulsive hands of Paul Spero. On several occasions when a crisis seemed imminent, she disappeared—always good-naturedly and on a new logical pretense—into the small cubbyhole to which she’d been assigned. So tactfully was all this accomplished that they’d already passed the halfway mark before Carl realized that he hadn’t spoken to her alone since during the preparations.

He was mildly surprised therefore, when while spelling Spero at the controls during the sleep period, he became suddenly aware of someone standing at his elbow. She was wearing a robins-egg-blue dressing robe, loose-fitting except around the curve of her breasts. She sat down in the co-pilot’s seat next to him.

“Mind if I keep you company awhile? I can’t seem to get to sleep.”

“A pleasure,” Carl said with genuine enthusiasm…. He stopped awkwardly, wondering what to say…. Impulsively, he ran his open hand across the width of the blister glass. “Want a hunk of space, baby. Say where to cut and I’ll slice it for you.”

She smiled a little. “You sound a little like Ferguson when you talk that way.”

Carl pretended to check the dials.

“Carl?”

On his forearm he could feel Diane’s fingers. He turned.

“What makes a man like that?”

He moved his shoulders. “I don’t know, unless it’s because he’s always been able to buy anything he’s ever wanted. As far as I know, there’s only been one thing he hasn’t been able to buy, and he’s working on that.”

“You mean immortality?”

Carl ignored the question. “Why ask me about Ferguson’s mind anyhow?” he asked suddenly. “You’re the psychologist of this expedition.” He watched her nibble on her lower lip for a moment, then went on: “You don’t have to admit it. I just want you to know you’ve been doing a good job. I don’t know how long you can keep it up or what happens after we get to Venus, but up till now you’ve been doing all right. There’s only one thing wrong with the setup as far as I can see, and that’s that this arm’s-length policy apparently applies to me as well as it does to everyone else. I know it’s necessary to the plan, and I know it’s a selfish argument, but it bothers me!”

She turned and faced him. For a moment it occurred to him she was angry, but when she spoke, her voice was soft, and deep, and lingering. “I’m sorry, Carl, but you can see why it has to be this way…. I mean—”

Carl leaned over suddenly and kissed her full on the lips. She didn’t pull away. Neither did she respond the way he’d have liked her to. After a brief interval he felt the pressure of her hand against his shoulder.

“Please Carl, not now.”

“When?”

She turned away. On the starboard port he could see the reflection of her finely-moulded face. She looked wistful, almost on the verge of tears.

“I don’t know, Carl,” she said wearily. “Maybe after we’re settled on Venus. Maybe after the migration starts.”

Keating hacked up a laugh. “Just what makes you so sure there’s going to be a migration, or for that matter any little men who never grow old as long as they have their daily diet of ammonia and chlorine?”

He watched her turn, felt her eyes bore into him. “You don’t believe it, do you?”

“I’m not sure,” Carl said carefully, “I want to believe it, only I’ve listened to so many bug yarns in my time it’s probably warped my sense of values. The whole thing just sounds too fantastic.”

“But the pictures?”

“The pictures were real enough,” Carl admitted. “I’d vouch for that. It’s just that if you’d ever caught a whiff of that stuff like I have, you’d know that no one could breathe it and stay alive for sixty seconds, much less forever.”

“What do you think we’ll find?”

Carl shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe the story’s true. Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like to be immortal—I mean after all the willful-wishing’s over with, and you get down to thinking about it in terms of ‘what’s-in-it-for-me.’ Most of us think of immortality as being something we could have on our own terms. But suppose everyone were immortal, the way they’ll be—or could be—after this so-called migration starts. How much will people have really changed. They’ll have just as many problems—bigger ones in fact, ’cause they’ll be living on what to me is just about the God-awfulest hunk of crud in the galaxy. And the only thing they’re getting in the way of compensation is the knowledge that these same troubles are going to go on forever.”

She was staring at him now—attentively with her lips slightly parted. “You feel this way, and you still agreed to come,” she said evenly. “Why?”

Carl forced a smile. “Like I said, maybe I can have it on my own terms. It’s a gamble, but if it pays off it’ll be worth it.”

Diane got up. “I’d best be getting back,” she said.

He watched her till she disappeared around the corner of the companionway. Then he fixed his gaze on the marble-sized disc to the right of Polaris.

“Immortality, and thou,” he murmured.

Carl Keating nosed the ship into a standard satellite maneuver, circling the planet twice before he cleaved into the unbroken ocean of ammonia clouds that shrouded the planet. Then they were falling—falling through a smoky whiteness that boiled against the portholes, settling in spots, and condensing into tiny rivulets that ran the length of the amber glass. The ship shuddered sharply three times as its powerful thrust engines reached out, challenging the herculean fingers of gravity; fighting them—fighting them to a draw. Then the misty ports cleared, and the ship settled with a gentle bump in the center of a broad meadow.

Not till after the controls had been checked, and the atomic reactor switch set to recharge, did he look at the passengers. They were standing in the companionway, their faces pressed against the ports. He crossed the control room and peered over the bony shoulder of Norman Hamlin.

Dismal-looking, even through the amber glass, the miserable panorama rolled away from them. A quarter-mile away, the meadow ended at the rim of a small ridge, beyond which a hill dipped down—down across the roof of a purple-brown saroo forest that merged with an abyss of swirling green fog that swallowed up the horizon. In the foreground, a few packing cases lay scattered about in front of a large white hemisphere topped by a radio antenna and American flag. It was all there, exactly the way it had been left by the military almost six months ago.

“That’s a permanent building,” Carl said to no one in particular. “Just before we evacuated, Colonel Brophy stocked it up with all our excess supplies, just on the chance someone might be crazy enough to come back here. We even left the separator running when we left. So take a good look at it, ’cause inside that bubble is the only breath of air on the whole planet.”

“Very nice of the military,” Ferguson commented dryly.

“Let’s hope we won’t have to use it long,” Dr. Hamlin said.

Carl looked out the port. Rain, that doused the planet almost twenty hours a day, had started to fall, settling in small puddles at the base of the ship and drenching the broad-leafed saroo trees.

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” he said.

As if in a trance, Diane continued to stare at the melancholy landscape. “It’s more that awful color than anything else,” she said finally. “It makes everything seem so angry looking. How about the rest of the planet? Is it all like this?”

“No,” Carl said, “it’s not all like this. That’s the trouble. This is one of the more livable spots. That’s why it was chosen by the military. Roughly ten percent of the planet lies above water, but out of that, only five percent of the terrain is in the visual belt.”

“I’ll play the straight man,” Ferguson said. “Tell us, Captain, what is the visual belt?”

“The visual belt represents the altitude from approximately three to four thousand feet above sea level,” Carl told him. “Below that you have the green ground haze you see over the tops of those trees, and above it is the ten-mile-thick layer of clouds that never lift. Both are so thick, that except around the fringe areas, you can’t even count your own fingers.”

“Nice place to take your girl for a walk,” Ferguson said, looking at Diane pointedly.

“Is anyone interested in what I think?” Spero said suddenly.

“Think away,” Carl said. “Who’s there to stop you?”

“That’s exactly what I’d like to talk about,” Spero said grimly. “It seems to me that for a fellow who left his rank back at the separation center, you’ve certainly been assuming a lot of authority around here.”

Carl felt a warm flush rising to his cheekbones. “We’ve been in space,” he said. “The pilot of a ship is responsible for the actions of everyone aboard.”

Spero jerked a thumb at the blister port. “I’ve got news for you, Keating,” he said. “We’re not IN space anymore, so you may consider yourself relieved of your authority. For five weeks now we’ve watched you swagger around the ship like the hero of a grade-B space-opera, and frankly I think we’re all a little sick of it!”

“Aren’t you dramatizing this a little heavy,” Diane said suddenly.

“Shut up!” Spero said harshly.

Stewart Ferguson sat down, folding his hands in his lap. “My, my,” he said. “A real live mutiny, just like one reads about. Tell me, when does Jack Jupiter come crashing through the lock-door?”

“I wasn’t aware that anyone in particular was in command,” Diane persisted, “but if you think we need someone, I’d suggest we take a vote.”

Spero grinned. “No, honey. We all know who your money’s riding on. That’s why you can forget all those dreams about you and Keating settling down in a saroo covered cottage for the next three or four thousand years. You see, I’ve got different plans.”

From the slash pocket of his tunic Spero suddenly whipped out a snub-nosed needle gun, waving it carelessly across the width of the cabin. He flicked a glance at Ferguson.

“Surprise,” he said. “Jack Jupiter just crashed the lock-door. I’m Jack Jupiter!”

“You’ll never get away with this,” Carl said.

The smile on Spero’s face broadened. “Oh, come Keating. How corny can you get? I have gotten away with it. Since I’m the only one who can lead you to immortality, what’s more natural than for me to take command? My first official act will be to detail you, Ferguson, and Dr. Hamlin to go outside and activate the blister. You’ll find space jumpers in the airlock. Diane and I will stay here and figure out a plan of action.”

Carl took a step forward. “I’m afraid we can’t go along with your plan,” he said quietly.

Spero leveled the lethal end of the weapon against his chest. “You’re acting stupidly, Keating. You know you can’t stop me, just as you know I’ll kill you if you try. You above all people should know that.”

There was a stagnant silence, during which Carl held his ground. Violently he was aware of the beating of his own heart. The tapping got louder as he watched Spero’s finger tighten on the trigger. Then suddenly he realized it wasn’t his heart. SOMEONE WAS TAPPING ON THE THICK GLASS INSIDE THE CONTROL ROOM.

Spero heard it, too. For a confused moment, his trigger-finger relaxed as he tried to flick a quick glance toward the source of the sound.

Then the world exploded in his face.

IV

Carl left Spero lying on the floor where he dropped him. Stopping only to scoop the gun off the floor, he ran to the control room. The tattoo on the glass stopped when he entered. A face peered in at him—a face curiously without emotion. It was a hairy-face, except around the eyes and mouth, where three patches of yellow skin peeked through, giving the appearance of three yellow bull’s eyes.

Carl stared at the creature, fascinated. In his entire stay on Venus, never had he observed a chowl at such close range. For perhaps five seconds the chowl stared back at him, then quickly bounded off the ship and disappeared toward the forest.

He turned. Diane, standing at the entrance to the control room was regarding him curiously. “They look almost human, don’t they?” she said.

“They are human,” Carl told her. “Humanoid anyhow according to the people who are supposed to know about these things. We don’t know too much about them really. They’re so timid, it’s a novelty to get within half-a-mile of them.”

“This one wasn’t.”

Carl scratched his head. “I know. It’s the first time I’ve ever got that close to one. I guess he didn’t know what a spaceship was. You notice he didn’t wait very long after he saw us through the window.”

“What are you going to do about Spero?” Diane asked suddenly.

Carl walked over to the gun cabinet where he poked around a moment, then returned with the key. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He placed both hands on the girl’s shoulders. “Just how much does this immortality really mean to you?”

Diane appeared to think about it a moment. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure at all. Sometimes I find myself wondering if I’m not more interested in finding out how it’s accomplished than I am in applying it to myself. Do you feel that way, too?”

Carl looked out the window.

“I’ve always felt that way,” he said.

Spero, aided by Dr. Hamlin, was just beginning to stir when they returned. He shook his head dazedly for a moment, then sat up massaging his jaw.

Keating regarded him with a questioning stare. “What do you think we should do with you?” he asked bluntly.

Spero patted his pockets and came up with a cigarette. After it had been lighted, he blew the smoke in Carl’s direction. “If you were smart, you’d kill me,” he said. “Only you’re not smart. You know you won’t, and I know you won’t. So suppose we all relax and stop trying to build up suspense.”

Carl dropped his hand inside his pocket, allowing his grip to tighten around the butt of the needle gun. “What makes you so sure I won’t kill you?” he said. “I could, you know. The fact you know where Edgerton and his cronies are wouldn’t stop me. I could probably find them myself if I wanted to. And I’m not even sure that I want to.”

Spero took a drag on the cigarette and derricked himself to his feet. “I wasn’t thinking of that,” he said quietly. “I just happen to know that you haven’t got it in you to kill a man in cold blood, Keating. I could do it but not you. You got too many principles. The worst you could bring yourself to do, Keating, would be to put it up to a vote. And if it came to that, everyone here—probably you included—would vote to let me off on the promise that I wouldn’t do it again. Go ahead, put it to a vote. See if I’m not right.”

Keating let his eyes wander across the cabin…. To Stewart Ferguson, white-looking, and curiously without comment…. To Diane, outraged amazement on her face—but still a woman. And to Norman Hamlin, wondering what made the man tick—but still a doctor. He looked back at Spero, blowing small curls of smoke at the ceiling.

No, he didn’t have to take a vote.

Impulsively, he waved the gun in the direction of the cubbyhole where Diane had been sleeping. “Get in there,” he said tightly.

Spero stubbed out the cigarette, swiveled a tight-lipped smile across each member of the party, then shrugged his shoulders and shuffled into the room.

Carl locked the door and stuck the key in his pocket along with the key to the gun case. While neither of the locks were built for durability, at least Spero would have to make a noise opening them.

To the others he said: “I’d suggest we make our future plans without figuring on Spero’s cooperation.”

“But how can we,” Dr. Hamlin said. “We’ll have to find Edgerton, Mitchell and Rhind first. They’re the only ones who know the answer to what we’re after.”

“The secret of immortality is nothing more than the secret of breathing the air here,” Carl said crisply. “Let’s not kid ourselves about that.”

“Well, what is the secret?” Hamlin said impatiently. “I’m sure I haven’t the slightest idea.”

Carl studied the man intently.

“Haven’t you?”

Diane shot him an odd look.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hamlin said hotly.

Keating ignored the question and jerked a finger at the window. “Suppose we leave Spero here and go over and activate the blister. It’s much more comfortable. It’ll be a nice change after being cramped up here for six weeks.”

“Suppose you explain that statement first?” Hamlin said.

“There’s jumpers in the airlock,” Carl went on. “I’ll explain after we’re settled over there. Who knows, maybe by that time I’ll be ready to apologize.”

“I certainly hope so,” Hamlin mumbled. “I can’t understand what’s got into everyone all of a sudden.”

“This way,” Carl said.

Inside the lock, he helped each member of the party into a jumper and adjusted the air valves. When everything was in order, he pressed a switch, and the lock-door hissed open.

Another moment, and they were wading through the purple-brown, ankle-deep slosh of Venus. The blister-building was only about three hundred yards from the ship, but the rain—coming down in torrents now—had turned the ground into a soft-slimy ooze that was sometimes knee deep.

Carl led the way, shouting instructions through the speaker-unit encased in his helmet. Once when Diane fell, he went back and helped her to her feet. Through the helmet glass, he could see her face for a moment. Then she jerked her arm free and plodded on. Behind him he heard Stewart Ferguson swear.

It took a full twenty minutes to reach the building. It was big. Two hundred feet in diameter at the base, it sloped out of the sea of mud like a giant stemless mushroom. Carl led the party around the base to the far side where the lock-door was situated. Then he stopped.

The rest of the party had caught up with him now. They stood in a restless semi-circle in front of the great doors. From behind mud-splattered face-plates, three pairs of eyes were regarding him curiously. He didn’t answer their solemn stare. Instead he continued to stare at the great lock-doors.

They were open.

For a full minute he stared into the darkness, then he touched the switch of his helmet lamp. The beam, seemingly thick enough to walk on, stabbed into the cave-like interior. He went in. First, he’d have to get the pumps working. Then, after the lethal gases had been pumped out, start the separator motors. Even then, the place wouldn’t be livable for three weeks. He swore.

Abruptly, from behind him, he became aware of three flickering beams of light. Diane and the two men were following him inside. He turned, waving his arms backward. “Stay back!” he called. “Wait till I get the lights working.”

He watched them stop.

And then, the lights WERE working. They came on all at once, illuminating the big structure with dazzling brilliancy. From behind him, he was aware of the staccato crackle of a squawk-box being readied for use. Then, like a bass drum in a brick tunnel, a voice boomed out of the stillness:

“Welcome! Welcome to Venus!”

He stepped back, trying to peer over the row of packing cases. The voice had originated from the control room at the far end of the building. He flinched when something touched the sleeve of his jumper, then relaxed when he saw Diane peering at him through a mud-stained face-plate. The men had joined him, too, looking at him and shifting from one foot to the other.

The squawk-box was silent now. Impulsively, Carl allowed his gloved hand to brush against the butt of the needle pistol holstered in the webbed-belt of his jumper.

“The gun won’t be necessary, I assure you. I’m unarmed!”

The speaker stood at the far end of a corridor of wooden cases, spotlighted in the glow of an overhead lamp. He was a young man, with close-cropped sandy-blonde hair. He wore a blue spaceman’s uniform—obviously salvaged from one of the cases.

He remained motionless a moment, like a man waiting for the press photographers to finish, then walked slowly toward them, his bare hand extended in greeting.

“I’m Raymond Edgerton,” the man said.

Awkwardly, Carl grasped the bare hand with the thick glove of his jumper. “I know,” he said. He was suddenly at a loss for words. What DID one say at a time like this? Certainly not the time-worn Dr. Livingston cliche.

Stewart Ferguson said it anyhow.

Carl studied the man carefully, watching the rise and fall of his breathing. The man WAS breathing—breathing the lethal gases that should kill him in thirty seconds.

“You find it hard to believe, don’t you?” Edgerton said suddenly.

Carl nodded. “I have a nephew who collects stamps,” he heard himself saying. “He has one with your picture on it. It’s a rarity now, ’cause it’s almost forty years old, but the picture on the stamp looks just like you—just like you do NOW!”

“How is it done Mr. Edgerton?” Diane asked pointedly. “Why is it that you can breathe this air when it kills everyone else?”

Edgerton’s eyes narrowed when he heard the voice. Then he leaned over and peered into the mud-stained face-plate. He smiled. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “A woman. A real live woman! Pretty too.”

“How is it done?” Diane persisted.

Edgerton’s grin faded. He turned to Carl. “You mean you don’t know?”

Carl eyed the man, his lips set in an aggravating silence. Then: “Yes, I know. Or at least I think I know. Furthermore, Dr. Hamlin knows too. He’s known all the time. Obviously, this girl is the only one who’s still in the dark. I think it’s about time someone told her.”

“Wait!” Dr. Hamlin said.

“Say, what’s this all about?” Edgerton said suddenly. “Where’s Paul Spero anyhow? Rhind and Mitchell are waiting!”

Carl flicked a look at Diane, then turned back to her father. “Are you going to tell her? Or should I?”

“Tell me what?” Diane said. “How does he know about Paul Spero? Spero told us….”

V

“Spero told us a lot of things,” Carl said thickly. “He told us he’d taken pictures without speaking to anyone. It served his purpose better to keep us in the dark about how this immortality thing was really worked until after we got here. After that, he figured he’d take over and we’d have to go along with him whether we liked it or not. Furthermore, Ferguson and your father were in on it from the beginning, weren’t you?”

“Please,” Dr. Hamlin said nervously, “it’s not near as bad as you’re making it out to be. It’s only a minor adjustment.”

“Minor adjustment!” Carl grasped the arm of Diane’s jumper, pulling her along with him through the long corridors of boxes. At the far end of the structure, he found what he was searching for. Three boxes—slitted in front like a zoo cage. And inside the boxes, peering at them through sad yellow-rimmed eyes—were three chowls.

“There’s the answer to your immortality,” Carl said grimly. “Rhind and Mitchell were both doctors—surgeons. Do you get it now?”

Raymond Edgerton and Norman Hamlin had joined them now. “Mr. Keating,” Edgerton said, “I’m sure if you were a doctor, you wouldn’t be so squeamish about a thing like this. After all, what’s a simple operation?”

“Simple operation!”

Carl reached over clamping his gloved hands on Edgerton’s shoulders. Quickly, he raked the steel-tipped fingers of both hands down the man’s back. There was a tearing noise, as the open-collared shirt ripped apart at the seams, revealing a broad fleshy back—smooth-looking except for where an angry gash dipped in a deep U between the shoulder blades.

He jerked his thumb back to where the chowls were chattering restlessly in their cages. “In case you don’t know it,” he said, “chowls are humanoid. They’re the only things on this planet with any sign of intelligence. Killing them’s not only murder. It’s worse than murder. It’s genocide! All that has to happen is for this story to get back to Terra, and you’ll have every quack who can wield a scalpel up here cutting the lungs out of these poor creatures!”

Alongside him, he was aware of Diane getting sick inside her helmet. Ferguson coughed.

“Since you were apparently aware of this all the time, Keating, just why did you come along?” Ferguson asked.

“I wasn’t aware of it all along. It wasn’t till I saw Dr. Hamlin nursing Spero’s jaw that I began to wonder why he wanted a doctor along in the first place. He needed you to finance the trip, and he needed me to pilot the ship. But why Dr. Hamlin unless there was some need for a surgeon? Then I remembered the chowls, and everything began to fall into place.”

Ferguson sat down on one of the wooden cases. “As usual Keating, you’re not being very logical. As a matter of fact, he didn’t need the good doctor at all. He had two doctors right here. Remember?”

Carl nodded. “Yes, I remember,” he said grimly. “That was the part of the puzzle that didn’t fit. But now I think I’ve even got the answer to that.”

“Do tell?”

“Yes, I’ll tell you,” Carl said ruthlessly. “It was because with all the build-up these would-be-gods gave you about this immortality gimmick, they were sick to death of it. They were sick of the loneliness, sick of the rain, sick of the color of purple. In short, they were sick of this foul planet and were willing to trade it in for whatever the earth had to offer them! That’s where Dr. Hamlin came in.”

Doggedly, Carl spun on Edgerton, trying to draw the tatters of his shirt back across his back.

“Who’s lungs were you going to take, Mr. Edgerton? Mine, or Stewart Ferguson’s?”

He was aware of Diane pulling on his arm. He turned to the two men in the mud-splattered jumpers. “We’re leaving for Terra in an hour,” he said crisply. “Are you coming, or staying?”

Ferguson and Hamlin stared at each other.

“Make up your mind!”

Abruptly, Dr. Hamlin walked over to where Diane was standing. “I’m an old man,” he said. “All I have back on Earth is twenty years at the most. Stay with me, Diane?”

Breathlessly, Carl watched the girl—watched her shake her head, slowly. “How about you?” he asked Ferguson.

For a long moment, Ferguson appeared undecided. Then he looked at Dr. Hamlin. “I’m in trouble back home,” he mumbled. “Bad trouble. They’re going to find out about it any day, if they haven’t found out already…. I—I’d better stay.”

With Diane grasping his arm, Carl started down the long corridor of packing cases toward the open lock-door.

“I’m sorry it turned out this way,” he said. “As soon as we ready the ship I’ll go back and talk to them again. Maybe they’ll change their minds.”

Diane didn’t answer. Instead she turned a last backward glance toward her father. It was a long glance. Too long. He was aware of her steel-tipped fingers digging into the sleeve of his jumper. He wheeled. Ten feet away, standing in a niche between the wooden cases, was a man. He wore a regulation space jumper and helmet, and was regarding them curiously over the barrel of a Westinghouse-chain-rifle. The man spoke:

“I’m interrupting something, I hope,” he said evenly.

The man was Paul Spero.

Carl eyed the man warily. Diane choked out a heavy gasp.

“You should have killed me back in the ship like I suggested,” Spero said smugly. “Now I’m going to have to kill you instead.”

Carl flicked a quick look at Diane. “What about her? Are you planning to kill her too?”

The overhead light sparkled briefly across the rifle barrel as Spero snapped the weapon to his shoulder. Across the sights he said: “Diane will stay here with me. That’s the way I planned it and that’s how it’ll be.”

“I know I’m interfering with your plans,” Carl said with mock-concern, “but I don’t think she is. Not unless she wants to of course.”

From behind the face-plate, Spero flashed a double row of teeth. “Stop stalling for time, Keating. You had your chance on the ship, and you muffed it. Now it’s my turn!”

Carl waited—waited while Spero’s gloved hand tightened against the trigger-switch. The bolt coil snapped back. There was a dull click—nothing else….

“Did you really think I’d be stupid enough to leave you alone with a case full of live guns?” Keating said thinly.

Bewildered, Spero snapped the rifle down to chest level, fumbling awkwardly with the trigger assembly.

“It won’t work,” Carl said indulgently. “Before we left the ship I removed the anodes from every gun in the case. It’s an old army trick, in case you haven’t heard.”

With Spero glaring at him, Carl allowed his arm to brush against his own needle gun. He didn’t bother to draw.

“I think your friends are waiting for you,” he said.

Back in the control room, Carl went through the motions of readying the ship for take-off. Back in the galley he could hear Diane sobbing softly.

Idly, he glanced out of the amber blister ports toward the big sphere-like structure that rose out of the sea of purple mud. It looked evil, and ominous-looking against the rain-sodden backdrop of the saroo forest.

Then from the edge of the tree line, moving shapes suddenly began to make an appearance. He rubbed his eyes. There were hundreds—no, thousands of them. Slowly and curiously they poured out of the rain-soaked forest, deliberately converging on the open lock-doors of the huge, white building. Some were carrying sticks, some stones, some nothing. It was as if the mystic forces of evolution had chosen this exact moment to endow the chowls with an emotion hitherto lacking in their makeup. Call it hate; call it self-preservation; call it anything you like, it was something they hadn’t had before, yet needed badly.

Quickly, he bit off the half-formed cry that rose to his throat. Diane was still back in the galley. He was glad she wasn’t watching. Actually there was no need for her to know about it ever.

Silently he made a vow never to tell her—even as a few moments ago they’d both vowed to keep another secret: The secret that could spell the life or death of an entire planet.

^^^

[From Project Gutenberg. Transcriber’s Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories November 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

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