He banged something. It sounded like he was hitting metal hard with a hammer, and then there was a series of pings, that sounded like he’d managed to loosen a piece and was pulling it around, the other way, slowly. “They were there,” his voice came above the other sounds. “In the dark of the cave. But then more and more humans ventured out into that dark, humans learned to make torches, take the fire with them, make the darkness less dark.
“And the monsters fled, before the light of the torches, before the certainty of the human minds that they were safe. They gathered in distant lands, in forests, in plains where they could ambush the human mind, feed on human fear. The few who ventured there and survived brought out stories. Fearful stories of those who lurked there. They came with claw and tentacle and with tearing fang, and humans ran back with stories and warnings. Don’t go into the forest, they said. And don’t stray far from the shore. And maps were drawn with vast areas marked Here there be dragons.
“But the humans came, over hill, around trees. They came in numbers, in family groups, in migratory bands. They cut down trees and built among them. What had been strange and wonderful became familiar, safe. The dangerous animals were killed and the suggestion of fangs, the shadow of claws retreated. The monsters retreated, to the cold, salty, trackless deep ocean, hovering over the unexplored waters. Till the humans went there too, and above the Earth, in the sky. And then the monsters fled, still further.
“These things were chased from Earth,” Jack put his head in the opening of the door, and grinned at me, a pantomime devil, his forehead sooted with machine oil, his eyes slanted and amused, and I thought he was laughing at me. This was almost all hazing, and he was laughing at me, amused at my discomfiture, waiting for my reaction. “Do you ever wonder?” he asked me, and raised his tumultuous eyebrows at me. “Do you ever wonder where they went? Where they are?”
“I imagine they went back to hiding under beds and scaring children,” I said, sardonically.
He went on, as if he hadn’t heard me, “They went out to the dark of space, to the unknown land out there—claw and wing, tentacle and fang. They wait out here, they wait—”
There was a particularly loud and vicious clang. “There will never be enough of us out here, far enough out here, to carry our light, our certainty of safety. Even the asteroid miners . . . How many are there at any time? A hundred? Fewer? Most places still send up robots to do the mining. It’s more loss of robots and time, more wasted trips, but fewer lives lost. There’s few of us, and space is immense. Out here—” Another clang, which gave me the impression that he’d gestured wide with his hand and hit something nearby. “Out here, they can live, undisturbed, they can spread and mutate and grow. They’ve found a place where we can’t overwhelm them, we can’t despoil them. They found their realm of cold and dark. We’re as nothing here. And when we venture here, they pounce—they come at us, to avenge their old wrong, their stolen paradise. We pushed them from the warm nights of Earth to here, and in the process we made them harder, sharper, more malicious. And they wait—for us.”
I sighed, and let my sigh be really audible. “I’m not going to be scared, Jack, I really am not. Did you tell these stories to my father? Was he scared?”
There was something like a short bark of laughter, and then, “I didn’t have to tell your father anything. He knew it already. There was this time, out in the belt—”
And then his voice died away, and a triumphant “aha!” came back, and there was a clang, and Jack came out, looking like he’d been crawling around in someone’s chimney, soot on his hair, soot marking his white eyebrows. He threw a wrench on the floor of the main cabin, and retreated to the fresher in the corner, with its vibro-clean.
I picked up the wrench and set it in the tool cabinet. When I’d come into the Gone Done It, there had been tools everywhere, and bits and pieces of material used for repairs. I’d tagged, organized it, put it away, and kept it put away, with no help from Jack. No wonder, I thought, the man dreamed of monsters hiding in dark and cluttered places. He’d been living in a dark and cluttered place when I’d got here.
That night we ate some dried fish, and a bit of hard bread. Food for asteroid miners was about as good as food had been for mariners. At least we didn’t have to drink grog, though given the Gone Done It’s ancient purification arrangements, it didn’t do to dwell too long on where the water we drank came from. And we didn’t.
We ate, and then we went to bed. The beds let down from the wall, each with a thin mattress and an ancient blanket that smelled as much of oil and soot as the rags that Jack used in the engine room.
We were in bed, one on either side of the cabin, when Jack said, “There was this one time, out in the belt—”
He sounded thoughtful, reminiscent, not at all like he’d sounded when he’d oh so obviously been trying to scare me. “Your father was standing guard—”
I didn’t say anything. It was one of those things. I knew Jack and Dad had taken some trips together. It was part of the reason that Jack had given me this chance at a trip, even though I was completely inexperienced. But the father I remembered was the man who came home with substantial funds for our account, the man who sat quietly, reading. The man who made Mother smile, and who never raised his voice to me.
I’d been torn, since I’d come on the ship with Jack, afraid of what he’d say. It sounds stupid and cowardly, but I wasn’t sure I was prepared to hear the man who was so neat at home had left tools and wrenches all over in the Gone Done It. It would be like looking at a side of him that my father had kept quiet, like peeking into someone who had been part of my father, but not the part Mother and I knew.
So I stayed quiet, and Jack was quiet a long time, and it seemed to me that he’d fallen asleep, but then he went on as though he’d been talking all alone, as though he spoke out of a deeper silence, as though I were remembering or seeing the same things he was remembering and seeing, and all he needed to do was give me a few words to remind me. “If he hadn’t been so fast on the uptake, Pete, the truth is, neither the Gone Done It nor I would be here. But it was all the work of a moment. By the time I came in, he’d chopped off the part of the thing that was inside the engine room, and he’d stopped the leak, and the only thing to say something odd had happened was that tentacle . . . It was the oddest thing, Pete . . . writhing and alive, but not flesh at all. It was as if it were made of darkness, built of shadow and gathered fear.
“When I turned the lights on, it vanished, but it left an icy feel in the air. An icy feel.”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure he wasn’t asleep and talking out of a nightmare. Surely what he was talking about was a nightmare. My father—
If my father had seen something that fantastic, he would have spoken. When I talked of going to the stars, he would have warned me. Surely—
There was no time to dwell on it, and in the morning I woke to Jack shaking me. He’d fixed the sensors, and we’d located an asteroid that was all platinum and some rare isotopes, and he wanted my help with the robots, to do the mining.
Asteroid mining is not a physical occupation, not even when humans go out as miners. You don’t put on your spacesuit and step out, and grunt and sweat with your pickax, to extract minerals from the wandering space junk. No, you use the sensors to detect the ore or the minerals or the rare Earths. And then you send out a probe that brings the stuff in to be analyzed and confirm your find. And finally you send little robots out, an army of ant-shaped homunculi who crawled all over the asteroid and cleaned it of anything that might be valuable on Earth.