I was better at controlling the harvesting robots than Jack was. Visual acuity and hand-eye coordination get worse with age. It fell to me to spend three days in front of the screen, manipulating the buttons and the pad, working to get those robots to harvest every last particle of saleable stuff, and to store it in our holds.
It was a small asteroid—maybe twenty feet across. But ours was a small ship. Once I was done, exhausted, my eyes burning from strain, my hands shaking from the days and days of close in work, the holds were full. And all I wanted was to sleep.
Jack had rested, and slept and played solitary while I harvested, and now he took over, as I crawled into my bed and fell into a sleep full of images of robots moving across the uncertain, flickering screen of the Gone Done it, my hand still reflexively moving, in my sleep, trying to gather more wealth into the hold, trying—
Jack meanwhile woke, and got on the controls. The last thing he said to me was, “I’ll take her home now, Pete. I’ll take us home now, son.”
I don’t know how long I slept. I thought it might have been hours, but it could as well be days. I hadn’t slept at all while harvesting, because we didn’t have the tech to hold onto the asteroid, and we had to harvest while we could, while we could follow its orbit, and before a smaller asteroid—or larger—hit against our relatively fragile side. Asteroid hits were always a danger in the asteroid belt, and probably the reason why the profession was considered hazardous, the one reason beyond the radiation why so few miners made old bones.
You couldn’t harden these small mining ships enough while keeping them light enough to carry ore and valuables back to Earth in quantity enough to justify the trip. Instead, every ship was provided with quick patches and fast-fix-it for the walls, and you hoped the meteor that hit you wouldn’t be big enough to take the ship out, and that it wouldn’t hit anyone on the way through the ship.
The Gone Done It had so many quick patches on her walls that there might be more of them than of the original walls. I knew no one had ever died in it. Which meant, I guess, it was better to be lucky than good.
I slept—I rocked in an ocean of deep and dark slumber, in a dream full of small asteroids zooming and dancing around the Gone Done It, slowly metamorphosing into dragons and ants and things with claws, dancing, safe, in the dark of space.
I don’t know how long.
I know I woke. I woke startled and shocked, from deep, dark sleep to wide awake, sitting on my bed, heart hammering, eyes open, trying to see into darkness.
There had been a sound. A clang.
An asteroid strike. It had to be an asteroid strike. I called into the darkness, “Jack?” but there was no sound. No. I lie. There was a sound. The sound was a whoosh, as though every wind on Earth had gathered there, to blow into the ship. No. To blow out of the ship.
Before the pressure and air alarm sounded its first jangling peep, I was up, and halfway in the space suit.
Bolting the helmet on, turning on my oxygen, I lurched into the engine room where the steering apparatus was, the place where Jack would be when he was driving us out of the asteroid belt, carefully trying to avoid just this kind of—
Just this kind of disaster. There was a hole on the wall in the engine room. Jack was on the floor, unconscious. I thought he was bleeding but it was hard to tell. It could be true. Or it could be that he’d passed out through lack of oxygen. It was probably pretty low in here, while the air hissed outside the ship.
I groped for the hole. And that’s when I felt it: the tentacle wrapped around my waist, pulling out. There was a claw clamped around my ankle. I saw, through my visor, fearful and intent, a large, slitty yellow eye, something like a malevolent cat, full of fury and vengeance.
The tentacle squeezed. The claw would pierce through the suit. There was a suggestion of teeth, a feeling of things, small, large, hungry, gnawing at the space suit.
I screamed. And then I reached for the emergency lights. As the tentacle dragged me inexorably, my hand fell on the button for the emergency light.
The light would have been turned off in here, of course, while we were underway, to allow Jack to concentrate on the screens that showed the view all around the ship. So he could avoid—
My hand, in its heavy glove, found the button and punched it.
For just a moment there was the feeling of tightening, of harder clawing. Then a shriek like a million damned forced out into the outer darkness.
The outer darkness—
Light coming on must have startled them. I had time to pull away from the tentacle, the claw, the myriad malevolent teeth without mouths that were trying to eat me into a maw of darkness.
And then by rote, without even glancing at Jack, without looking at the things of darkness and cold, insubstantial but real, which filled the engine room, I applied patch and fast-fix-it. I slammed the controls to bring the emergency oxygen into circulation.
I fixed, I cleaned, I made all safe.
I didn’t go to Jack till it was all done, because I had a feeling what I would find. It was as I’d expected. The old miner was dead, on the floor, sprawled like a broken doll, his skin gone the pallor of a landed fish, his eyes wide open and staring at some unimaginable horror.
What I wasn’t expecting, what I wasn’t prepared for, was his wounds: A hundred piercings, a thousand cruel rents where claw and fang had gone in.
I gave him a burial in space, as best I could, and I cleaned the floor of the engine room, and I tried to forget the brief view I had when the lights came on, of tentacle and claw and fang.
I never spoke of it. Won’t speak of it. What good would it do? At best people would think I was playing an hoax on them . . . At worst—
There was enough money, even when I’d split with Jack’s widow, to get me the module to become a navigator.
The bigger ships, the interstellar ones that do commerce with the colonies are well-armored enough. There’s no reason to fear the sort of asteroid strike that was carefully recorded in the log book of the Gone Done It as having caused Jack’s death.
There is nothing to fear. I’m told that our interstellar ships are some of the safest forms of transportation. You stand a better chance of dying on Earth from having an asteroid fall on your head out of a clear blue sky than you stand of dying in one of these.
Deaths happen, of course. Nothing is ever completely safe. We lose a ship or three every few decades. But the causes, though often not explained, simply because the ships can’t be recovered from the immensity of space, are usually obvious and mundane: engine failure, human error and, often presumed, simply landing in a place other than where the ship meant to go. Not hard to do with quantum ships that navigate the n-dimensional folds of an infinite space.
My cabin in the interstellar ship is large, well appointed, bigger than my parents’ house, back on Earth.
It’s impossible that, lying there, snug in my comfortable bed, I can actually hear anything through the thick walls of the ship.
And yet, often and often I wake in the night, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. If anyone heard of these night terrors, they’d invalid me out of the service as unstable, so I tell no one.
But in the deep dark of ship night, while everyone else sleeps, I hear the wings of something large, gross and unnamable circling round and round the ship, just touching. I hear tentacles scraping the outside, searching, trying to find me again, trying to pull me out there, into the dark, the cold.