"But it can't be—"
"Don't argue. What does it say?"
Johns seemed to shrink inside himself. His lips stretched to form the words his mind rejected. "It says—it says the galaxy we're approaching has no mass."
Shetland smiled grimly. "I ask you again, do you believe in ghosts?"
"Yes, there is a ghost," Shetland said, as the Meg II's hull vibrated to the impact of her chemical propulsion. She was maneuvering for a position to begin the return voyage.
The four of them were in the beacon room again, watching the steady flame, "All of us had some hint of the truth," Shetland said, "but we were blinded by our separate conceptions of the mission and by our mutual dread of the unknown. We tried to exclude the supernatural—not realizing that when the supernatural is understood, it becomes natural. Cartographer Beeton was closest to it—"
"But I wasn't able to face emotionally what my intellect showed me," Beeton said. "The thing is so incredible—"
"I still don't follow you," Johns protested. "We're alive, and there's a—a thing out there. I'll admit that much. But nothing in the universe is solid enough to rock a ship in high FTL, and we were at 16.34. That's a light-year per second! But we were battered so badly that a crate of beans broke loose and shoved itself through the hull. Or tried to." He laughed. "Wouldn't that be an epitaph for a lost ship: torpedoed by a can of beans in FTL!"
"I, too, am perplexed," Somnanda said. "I understood that it was certain destruction to drop the shield while in FTL. Solid matter can not exist at a light-year per second."
"We phased in with the ghost," Shetland said. "Beeton, things are clearer. Finish your explanation."
Beeton plunged in happily. "As I was trying to say at an earlier occasion, but somehow couldn't quite put into sensible words: At the center of things, a galaxy is young. But in the course of fifty billion years or so it ages, and like an aging man it changes. For one thing, it puts on weight, becomes sluggish. A galaxy in its late prime is an unbelievably massive thing—so dense that its surface gravity prevents its own light from escaping. Within it, nevertheless, breakdown continues, and the prisoned energies—well, we have had no experience with such a state.
"Eventually all matter is gone—but there is still no escape for that phenomenal complex of energy. We are left with a galaxy whose material portion has passed away, but which still exists as an entity. A ghost."
"The ghost of a galaxy!" Johns said. "But that shouldn't affect—"
"You forget that the ghost is moving," Shetland said. "That un-galaxy is traveling at rim-velocity: 16.04, ship's clock. Since there is no other—"
"Which means it determines stasis for this area of space!" Johns exclaimed. "Velocity is meaningless in the void. It has to be relative to some mass, or—"
"Or some ghost," Beeton put in. "Apparently our laws of physics change, here. We've discovered a lot more than a galaxy."
"So we decelerated to within light speed of the ghost, and the shield came down automatically, and left us in normal space. Even at the fringe, those energies were overloading the drive—" Johns paused. "But what would have happened if we had landed inside the ghost?"
"Or even traveled through it in FTL," Somnanda said.
Shetland considered. "I suspect the nature of space itself is altered within the ghost. The Meg I did unwittingly enter it..."
There was silence as the implication sank in. Was this the final evidence that man was limited after all, in spite of his limitless ambition? Hemmed in by numberless and deadly ghosts... or was their very existence a new challenge, greater than any before? What would the first explorers find, when they parked their fleet and penetrated, carefully, the fringe of that monster?
"Captain."
Shetland looked up. "Your move, Captain."
WITHIN THE CLOUD
This is another retitling, showing the editor's ignorance. My title was "Cloud," and the fantasy is about a cloud and its foggy sense of humor. It's a minor effort—so naturally this was the first of my "unrejected" sales. That's right—it sold the first time out, for a healthy three cents a word, and represents my only appearance in Galaxy, supposedly a science fiction magazine. (By this time Galaxy Publications also owned If, which had become a sloppier magazine that paid lower rates.) Probably if the editor had understood the story, he would have rejected it. Who was this editor? Such ilk need not be anonymous! He was Fred Pohl, who as a writer is one of the best in the genre. I think he's a great writer and a great guy personally; I just am no particular fan of his mode of editing, about which I will have more to say in due course. It's a Jekyll/Hyde thing, I think; I doubt that Pohl-as-Writer would stand for Pohl-as-Editor on his own material; if he did, it would suffer. But perhaps the man should be allowed to speak for himself; read his fascinating memoir, The Way the Future Was (Del Rey: 1978).
"Believe me, this is not a joke," the portly tourist said. He was careful to face the man as he spoke.
"We think you can help us, and my wife won't give me any peace until—Anyway, all you have to do is look at a few seconds of film. Twenty dollars for your trouble, even if you can't make anything of it."
The man nodded. He led the way to an empty classroom and set up a projector and screen, while the woman waited anxiously.
The projector started and stopped. The man grunted and unscrewed the lamp, showing them that it had blown. He signaled them to remain and stepped into the hall.
"This is eerie," the woman said. She was perhaps ten years younger than her husband, quite pretty, but temperamental. "Who would have thought we'd wind up visiting a school for deaf-mutes on our vacation!"
"Well, you started it," the tourist said. "You and that hyperactive imagination."
"I started it!" she exclaimed indignantly.
"Don't you remember? That afternoon on the beach. All I wanted was to get some tan on my back, but you kept chattering about clouds—"
"I like clouds," she said. "They're so free, and they take so many shapes. No one tells them what to do; no one grouches at them." She nudged her husband playfully. "If I were a Confucian, I'd reincarnate as a cloud, and—"
"Buddhist."
"Anyway, I'd be a cloud and just float along without a care in the world, free free free free!"
"The Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation," he said, "but I'm not sure a cloud was their idea of Nirvana."
"Free free free free!" she repeated. "Why are you always so serious? You have no sense of humor at all."
"You wouldn't appreciate my humor," he said.
"Now look at that cloud right over us. See—it's almost like a face, looking down at us." She nudged him.
He rolled over in the warm sand, squinting up.
"See," she repeated urgently. "Two ears at the sides, two sorrowful dark eyes, a long thundersome nose—"
"—and a big, ugly, voluminous, gassy mouth," he agreed irritably. "Wide open."
"Half open."
"You talk more than you look. That's a perfect 'O.' "
She studied the cloud more carefully. "Well it was half open. If you'd looked when I told you the first time."
"Uh-huh." He squeezed her tanned knee comfortably and closed his eyes.
"Now it's shut again."
He rolled over, not looking. "Why don't you make up your—"