Tom gave Ben a swift glance and rushed across the rocks to meet his sister. She fell into his arms, her words coming so fast that Ben couldn’t catch them as he moved slowly toward the pair. When Joyce saw him she clutched her brother even closer, her eyes wide with horror. “Don’t let him come near,” she sobbed. “Keep him away, Tom, don’t let him come near. This time we’re the ones that are trapped, just because we listened to this—this traitor!”
Ben stared at Tom, his jaw sagging. Tom shook his sister. “What are you talking about?” he said. “Get hold of yourself! What do you mean?”
“I mean I saw them, that’s what I mean!” The girl’s voice rose hysterically. “He’s been lying to us all the time! They’re here, I saw them, back there in the rocks. They were standing there staring at me…
and he said there weren’t any such things!”
“Any such whats?”
“Monsters,” Joyce Barron gasped. “Horrible mutant monsters.” She turned to glare at Ben Trefon.
“You can stop lying to us now, because it won’t do any good any more. You people have an army of monsters, all right. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. And this horrible rock is alive with them!” 8 THE CLEFT IN THE ROCK
FOR THE FIRST moment Ben Trefon could hardly credit his ears. He stood staring at the girl as her words tumbled out. She couldn’t really mean what she was saying, he thought, but there was no mistaking the words. Even though she was not making sense, he had heard her with perfect clarity. And from the scornful look on her face, she was not joking in the least.
Ben shook his head in confusion. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Just slow down and wait a minute. What are you talking about?”
Joyce clung to her brother’s arm. “I’m talking about monsters,” she said. “I saw them back there—three, four, maybe a dozen. Horrible little things three feet high with gray skin and wrinkles and eyes like fire.” Her voice was unsteady as she tried to keep from sobbing.
“Take it easy, now,” Tom said gently. “Pull yourself together. You mean that you actually saw something?”
“Of course I saw something!” Joyce Barron wailed. “What do you think I’m saying? They’re all around back there. For all I know we could be surrounded right now.” For a moment the thought of space fever crossed Ben’s mind. Every Spacer knew that this kind of irrational break-down could occur as a result of isolation for long periods in the loneliness of space.
Sometimes the pressures of just staying alive in the face of a hostile environment could become overwhelming and break forth in hallucinations and hysteria. Ben had spent two weeks on a ship with a man who had broken down in such a fashion during his training school days, but there had been clues to what was coming for days before the break occurred. It was impossible to believe that such a thing could strike out of the blue without the slightest warning, unless Joyce Barron were a far better actress than Ben thought she was.
There was only one alternative: that Joyce actually had seen something that nearly frightened her out of her wits. A rock formation, some movement of shadows on the asteroid surface, perhaps a shifting of the surface rubble under the influence of the asteroid’s barely measurable gravity—whatever it was, there was only one way to deal with it. “If you really think you saw something,” Ben said, “then tell us what.
Not what you think you saw, I mean what you really saw.”
“As if you don’t know perfectly well,” the girl said bitterly. “And to think we believed all your talk about the poor, mistreated Spacers and their good intentions!”
“All right, let’s get that straight first,” Ben said. “Maybe you did see something, but if you did it was nothing I know anything about. There aren’t any Spacer mutants. We don’t have any monsters bottled up in caves anywhere.” He looked at Tom. “Maybe I can’t make you believe that, but it just happens to be true all the same.”
“Then what did she see?” Tom said.
“I don’t have the vaguest idea,” Ben replied. “But believe me, if it was three feet tall with gray skin and wrinkles I want to see it too. I’ve been on a hundred of these rocks, and I’ve never seen anything alive on one yet. If there is something living here, we’d better find out about it fast.” Something in his voice must have told, for a little of the terror and bitterness in the girl’s face softened.
“There was something there, all right,” she said. “I was following the trail I made around that spur of rock over there, looking for some more of the crystals I found over there yesterday. I was working to shake loose a piece that was wedged into the rock when something made me look up and I saw this face staring down at me. It just sat there and looked at me, and then all of a sudden it was gone.”
“Couldn’t it have been a rock formation?” Ben asked. “Sometimes these rocks move without anybody touching them.”
“Have you ever seen a rock with blue eyes?” Joyce said. “That blinked? It was no rock, it was an ugly, horrible thing with long spindly arms and little crooked legs. And then as soon as I moved I saw two or three more scurrying back into the rocks.”
Ben looked up at Tom and shook his head. “I think we’d just better have a look,” he said.
“Well, you’re not going to get me back there,” Joyce said firmly.
“I’m afraid we are. You’ve got to show us where you saw these—these creatures, and which way they went.” Ben found a locker key in his pocket, tossed it to Tom. “Go open my foot locker,” he said.
“You’ll find your revolver there, and a couple of tangle-guns.” Tom disappeared into the ship and emerged a moment later with the weapons. He caught Ben’s eye and drew him aside. “Do you really think we’re going to find anything?” Ben shook his head. “I don’t see how. There’s no atmosphere on these rocks, and nothing even remotely resembling food. I hate to say it, but I think your sister’s imagination got out of control.
Somehow she fooled herself into thinking she saw something that she didn’t see at all.” But he didn’t quite feel the conviction of his words. There was another thought in his mind which Ben just couldn’t shake off. Of course there was non-human life in many parts of the solar system. Mars had an abundance of desert life: little gopher-like creatures that lived in burrows in the sand, tiny sand-snails that could dissolve sandstone for the algae living in its crevices, even the Jumping Jacks that could bound twenty feet in the air and travel at enormous speed across the dunes like a cross between the kangaroo and the jack rabbit. He had seen the Venusian mud-puppies that thrived in the steaming bogs of the second planet, and the strange pterodactyl-like birds with leathery wings that skimmed through the thin methane atmosphere of Saturn’s Titan, settling down like Satanic demons in rows on the rocks to watch Spacer exploring parties.
An abundance of life, but never before had any life of any kind been found on the asteroids, particularly three-foot creatures with gray skins and horrible eyes. Ben could not even think of any living creature he had ever encountered that might fit that description. What Joyce had said she had seen was impossible, unless there was some form of life here that had never been detected.
Or that had just recently come…
Again Ben’s mind snagged on the thought he had been trying to avoid, a thought that nagged at him now as the three of them started down the trail Joyce pointed out. An invisible phantom ship, Ben thought, that made contact, and watched us, and then slipped away out of reach as soon as it was seen.