Gary lit his pipe again and silence fell for just a space. "Voices," said Herb.
They all stared out at that darkness that hemmed them in. Gary felt the hairs bristle at the nape of his neck. Some cold wind from far away had brushed against his face, an unnamable terror out of the cosmos reaching out for him, searching for him with dirty-taloned thoughts. Things that hurled pure thought across the deserts of emptiness that lay between the galaxies.
"Tell me," said Caroline, and her voice, too, seemed to come from far away, "how did the war come out?”
"The war?" asked Gary. Then he understood.
"Oh, the war," he said. "Why, Earth and Mars finally won out. Or so the histories claim. There was a battle out near Ganymede and both fleets limped home badly beaten up. The Jovians went back to Jupiter, the Earth-Mars fleet pulled into Sandebar on Mars. For months the two inner planets built up their fleets and strengthened home defenses. But the Jovians never came out again and our fleets didn't dare carry the war to the enemy. Even today we haven't developed a ship that dares go into Jupiter's atmosphere. Our geosectors might take us there and bring us back, but you can't use them near a planetary body. They work on the principle of warping space…”
"Warping space?" asked the girl, suddenly sitting upright.
"Sure," said Gary. "Anything peculiar about it?" "No," she said, "I don't suppose there is.”
Then: "I wouldn't exactly call that a victory.”
"That's what the histories call it." Gary shrugged. "They claim we run the Jovians to cover and they've been afraid to come out ever since. Earth and Mars have taken over Jupiter's moons and colonized them, but to this day no one has sighted a Jovian or a Jovian ship. Not since that day back in 5980.
"It's just one of them things," Herb decided for them.
The girl was staring out at space again. Hungry for seeing, hungry for living, but with the scars of awful memories etched into her brain.
Gary shivered to himself. Alone, she had taken her gamble and had won. Won against time and space and the brutality of man and the great indifference of the mighty sweep of stars.
What had she thought of during those long years? What problems had she solved? What kind of a person could she be, with her twenty-year-old body and her thousand-year-old brain?
Gary nursed the hot bowl of his pipe between his hands, studying the outline of her head against the vision-plate. Square chin, high forehead, the braided strands wrapped around her head.
What was she thinking now? Of that lover who now would be forgotten dust?
Of how he might have tried to find her, of how he might have searched through space and failed? Or was she thinking of the voices… the voice talking back and forth across the gulfs of empty space?
The spacewriter, sitting in its own dark corner, broke into a gibbering chatter.
Gary sprang to his feet.
"Now what?" he almost shouted.
The chattering ceased and the machine settled into the click-clack of its message.
Gary hurried forward. The other two pressed close behind, looking over his shoulder.
NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. KINGSLEY REPORTS RECEIVING STRANGE MESSAGES FROM SOMEWHERE OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM. UNABLE, OR UNWILLING, TO GUESS AT SOURCE. REFUSES TO GIVE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH MESSAGES WERE RECEIVED OR CONTEXT OF THEM, IF IN FACT HE KNOWS CONTEXT. URGENT THAT YOU GET STATEMENT FROM HIM SOONEST. REGARDS. EVENING ROCKET.
The machine's stuttering came to an end.’
The three stared at one another.
"Messages," said Herb. "Messages out of space.”
Gary shook his head. He stole a swift glance at the girl and her face seemed pale. Perhaps she was remembering.
Chapter Four
Trail's end, Pluto's single community, cowering at the foot of a towering black mountain, seemed deserted. There was no stir of life about the buildings that huddled between the spacefield and the mountain. The spiraling tower of the radio station climbed dizzily spaceward and beside it squatted the tiny radio shack. Behind it stood the fueling station and the hangar, while half a mile away loomed the larger building that housed the laboratories of the Solar Science commission.
Caroline moved closer to Gary.
"It seems so lonely," she whispered. "I don't like loneliness now…
after…”
Gary stirred uneasily, scraping the heavy boots of his spacesuit over the pitted rock. "It's always lonely enough," he said. "I wonder where they are.”
As he spoke the lock of the radio shack opened and a space-suited figure strode across the field to meet them.
His voice crackled in their helmet phones. "You must be Nelson," it said.
"I'm Ted Smith, operator here. Kingsley told me to bring you up to the house right away.”
"Fine," said Gary. "Glad to be here. I suppose Evans is still around.”
"He is," said Smith. "He's up at the house now. His ship is in the hangar.
Personally, I figure he's planning to take off and let the SCC do what they can about it.”
Smith fell in step with them. "It's good to see new faces," he declared, "especially a woman. We don't have women visitors very often.”
"I'm sorry," said Gary. "I forgot.”
He introduced Caroline and Herb to Smith as they plodded past the radio shack and started for the laboratory.
"It gets God-lonesome out here," said Smith. "This is a hellish place, if I do say so myself. No wind. No moon. No nothing. Very little difference between day and night because there's never any clouds to cover the stars and even in the daytime the Sun is little better than a star.”
His tongue, loosened by visitors to talk to, rambled on. "A fellow gets kind of queer out here," he told them.
"It's enough to make anyone get queer. I think the doctor is half crazy from staying here too long. He thinks he's getting messages from some place far away. Acts mysterious about it.”
"You think he just imagines it?" asked Herb.
"I'm not saying one way or the other," declared Smith, "but I ask you…
where would you get the messages from? Think of the power it would take just to send a message from Alpha Centauri. And that isn't so very far away. Not so far as stars go. Right next door, you might say.”
"Evans is going to fly there and back," Herb reminded him.
"Evans is space-nuts," said Smith. "With all the solar system to fool around in, he has to go gallivanting off to the stars. He hasn't got a chance. I told him so, but he laughed at me. I'm sorry for him. He's a nice young fellow.”
They mounted the steps, hewn out of living stone, which led to the main airlock of the laboratory building. Smith pressed a button and they waited.
"I suppose you'll want Andy to go over your ship,”
Smith suggested.
"Sure," said Gary. "Tell him to take good care of it.”
"Andy is the fueling-station man," the radio operator explained. "But he hasn't much to do now. Most of the ships use geosectors. There's only a few old tubs, one or two a year, that need any fuel. Used to be a good business, but not any more.”
The space lock swung open and the three stepped inside. Smith remained by the doorway.
"I have to go back to the shack," he said. "I'll see you again before you leave.”
The lock hissed shut behind them and the inner screw began to turn. It swung open and they stepped into a small room that was lined with spacesuits hanging on the wall.
A man was standing in the center of the room. A big man, with broad shoulders and hands like hams. His unruly shock of hair was jet-black and his voice boomed jovially at them.