“Aunt Jane?”
The voice answered promptly, “Yes, Paul.”
“This distress that the books talk about-you wouldn’t know what it is, would you?”
“No, Paul.”
“Because robot brains don’t feel it, right?”
“Right, Paul.”
“So tell me this-why do they need a man here at all? Why can’t they get along with just you?”
A pause. “I don’t know, Paul.” The voice sounded faintly wistful. Were those gradations of tone really in it, Wesson wondered, or was his imagination supplying them?
He got up from the living room couch and paced restlessly back and forth. “Let’s have a look at Earth,” he said. Obediently, the viewing screen on the console glowed into life: there was the blue Earth, swimming deep below him, in its first quarter, jewel bright. “Switch it off,” Wesson said.
“A little music?” suggested the voice, and immediately began to play something soothing, full of woodwinds.
“No,” said Wesson. The music stopped.
Wesson’s hands were trembling; he had a caged and frustrated feeling.
The fitted suit was in its locker beside the air lock. Wesson had been topside in it once or twice; there was nothing to see up there, just darkness and cold. But he had to get out of this squirrel cage. He took the suit down and began to get into it.
“Paul,” said Aunt Jane anxiously, “are you feeling nervous?”
“Yes,” he snarled.
‘Then don’t go into Sector Two,” said Aunt Jane.
“Don’t tell me what to do, you hunk of tin!” said Wesson with sudden anger. He zipped up the front of his suit with a vicious motion.
Aunt Jane was silent.
Seething, Wesson finished his check-off and opened the lock door.
The air lock, an upright tube barely large enough for one man, was the only passage between Sector One and Sector Two. It was also the only exit from Sector One; to get here in the first place, Wesson had had to enter the big lock at the “south” pole of the sphere, and travel all the way down inside, by drop hole and catwalk. He had been drugged unconscious at the time, of course. When the time came, he would go out the same way; neither the maintenance rocket nor the tanker had any space, or time, to spare.
At the “north” pole, opposite, there was a third air lock, this one so huge it could easily have held an interplanetary freighter. But that was nobody’s business-no human being’s.
In the beam of Wesson’s helmet lamp, the enormous central cavity of the Station was an inky gulf that sent back only remote, mocking glimmers of light. The near walls sparkled with hoarfrost. Sector Two was not yet pressurized; there was only a diffuse vapor that had leaked through the airseal and had long since frozen into the powdery deposit that lined the walls. The metal rang cold under his shod feet; the vast emptiness of the chamber was the more depressing because it-was airless, unwarmed and unlit. Alone, said his footsteps; alone…
He was thirty yards up the catwalk when his anxiety suddenly grew stronger. Wesson stopped in spite of himself and turned clumsily, putting his back to the wall. The support of the solid wall was not enough. The catwalk seemed threatening to tilt underfoot, dropping Mm into the lightless gulf.
Wesson recognized this drained feeling, this metallic taste at the back of his tongue. It was fear.
The thought ticked through his head: They want me to be afraid. But why? Why now? Of what?
Equally suddenly, he knew. The nameless pressure tightened, like a great fist closing, and Wesson had the appalling sense of something so huge that it had no limits at all, descending, with a terrible endless swift slowness…
It was time.
His first month was up.
The alien was coming.
As Wesson turned, gasping, the whole huge structure of the Station around him seemed to dwindle to the size of an ordinary room-and Wesson with it, so that he seemed to himself like a tiny insect, frantically scuttling down the walls toward safety.
Behind him as he ran, the Station boomed.
In the silent rooms, all the lights were burning dimly. Wesson lay still, looking at the ceiling. Up there his imagination formed a shifting, changing image of the alien-huge, shadowy, formlessly menacing.
Sweat had gathered in globules on his brow. He stared, unable to look away.
“That was why you didn’t want me to go topside, huh, Aunt Jane?” he said hoarsely.
“Yes. The nervousness is the first sign. But you gave me a direct order, Paul.”
“I know it,” he said vaguely, still staring fixedly at the ceiling. “A funny thing… Aunt Jane?”
“Yes, Paul?”
“You won’t tell me what it looks like, right?”
“No, Paul.”
“I don’t want to know. Ix>rd, I don’t want to know… Funny thing, Aunt Jane, part of me is just pure funk-I’m so scared I’m nothing but a jelly.”
“I know,” said the voice gently.
“-And part is real cool and calm, as if it didn’t matter. Crazy, the things you think about. You know?”
“What things, Paul?”
He tried to laugh. “I’m remembering a kids’ party I went to twenty, twenty-five years ago. I was-let’s see-I was nine. I remember, because that was the same year my father died.
“We were living in Dallas then, in a rented mobile house, and there was a family in the next tract with a bunch of redheaded kids. They were always throwing parties; nobody liked them much, but everybody always went.”
“Tell me about the party, Paul.”
He shifted on the couch. “This one-this one was a Halloween party. I remember the girls had on black and orange dresses, and the boys mostly wore spirit costumes. I was about the youngest kid there, and I felt kind of out of place. Then all of a sudden one of the redheads jumps up in a skull mask, hollering, ‘C’mon, everybody get ready for hide-and-seek.’ And he grabs me, and says, ‘You be it,’ and before I can even move, he shoves me into a dark closet. And I hear that door lock behind me.”
He moistened his lips. “And then-you know, in the darkness-I feel something hit my face. You know, cold and clammy, like-I don’t know-something dead…
“I just hunched up on the floor of that closet, waiting for that thing to touch me again. You know? That thing, cold and kind of gritty, hanging up there. You know what it was? A cloth glove, full of ice and bran cereal. A joke. Boy, that was one joke I never forgot… Aunt Jane?”
“Yes, Paul.”
“Hey, I’ll bet you alpha networks made great psychs, huh? I could lie here and tell you anything, because you’re just a machine-right?”
“Right, Paul,” said the network sorrowfully.
“Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane… It’s no use kidding myself along. I can feel that thing up there, just a couple of yards away.”
“I know you can, Paul.”
“I can’t stand it, Aunt Jane.”
“You can if you think you can, Paul.”
He writhed on the couch. “It’s-it’s dirty, it’s clammy. My God, is it going to be like that for five months? I can’t, it’ll kill me, Aunt Jane.!’
There was another thunderous boom, echoing down through the structural members of the Station. “What’s that?” Wesson gasped. “The other ship-casting off?”