With strict method, he checked the space suit. Air. Batteries. Signs of wear. Space cord. He put it on and transferred the items from his pockets to the suit.
He was putting on the helmet when a clanging, clamorous gong sounded stridently and persistently in the blister, as it did in every other part of Lambda, where a human being could be.
He knew what it was, a meteor-alarm giving notice of some sizable object approaching the Lambda on a collision or a near-miss course. Its sound was distinctive and jangling. Bugsy’s men would know!
Scott settled his helmet with a professional twist rare even to the men of the Patrol. He opened the small side port that work-parties used when a ship was aground, but very rarely in space.
He stepped out on the outer surface of the buoy.
There were nearly no stars. The Lambda was already within the mist, the infinitely thin shining stuff which was the visible part of a comet. Nothing but that luminous haze could be seen in the direction toward which the Lambda moved. The glittering marker-buoy, only a mile and a half from Lambda, was utterly distinct. But perhaps fifty stars out of billions could still be seen in the direction from which the buoy had come.
It went on toward destruction as Scott stood clumsily in magnetic-soled shoes on the buoy’s hull.
CHAPTER 7
A class in nature study on Trent looked fascinatedly through transparent panels at carefully preserved specimens of the fauna and flora of that now long-settled world. Earth organisms brought by the early colonists had long since crowded out the native types everywhere that they were not especially guarded. On another world, the planet Tambu, the chains of volcanos that so impressed the first exploring parties were now tamed, and vast industrial complexes operated on the unlimited power they produced. The watery world of Glair had seemed to defy humanity to subdue its single, limitless brackish sea for merely human uses. But there were colonies on its floating ice-caps now, and processing ships used electric currents to herd marine creatures into motor-driven nets, while electrolyctic plants continually extracted rare-metal elements from the semi-salt seawater. And there was Fourney, and Glamis, and Krail. On Fourney, colonists prepared exportable planetary specialties from the hides of the largest carnivores in the galaxy. On Glamis useful and profitable products were made from the half-animal vegetation whose various species devoured each other and tried to kill men. And even the murderously poisonous Krailian trees called upas—from an Earth tradition—were now confined to special forests, and from their venom, men extracted a cure for indigestion.
All through the galaxy it seemed that there was defiance of mankind. And all through the galaxy men complacently made profit out of things designed to frustrate them. They didn’t often destroy the inimical things they encountered. Usually they diverted them from the purposes which were their own, and turned them to use for the purposes of mankind.
But Canis Lambda seemed for a long time to have won a single, isolated victory over men.
Man began to search for planets on which to deposit its ever-growing population. It had found and settled worlds so rapidly, though, that there was now no planet anywhere which did not clamor for more inhabitants. And still new worlds appeared. But Canis Lambda, burning fiercely in emptiness, still defied men.
Eons since, when humans first blinked astonished eyes at the miracle of fire, in the First System, Canis Lambda had taken measures. Then it had four planets which men might eventually desire. So Canis Lambda destroyed them—shattered them and turned them into jagged, ragged scraps and lumps of broken stone and steel. It left specimens large enough to mock the men who would some day arrive. There were a few asteroids not less than forty miles in diameter. Smaller bits couldn’t be counted or even estimated. But none could be of any conceivable use to mankind. And Canis Lambda flamed sullen triumph at its victory for hundreds of thousands of years.
When men did come to it, there was nothing for them to live on or mine or make any use of at all. But they’d have liked to find a planet there. There wasn’t one. So they made a robot checkpoint there to do part of what their plans required.
Canis Lambda destroyed it. Men built another. Canis Lambda destroyed that. So then men drove out an ancient space liner which otherwise would have been made into scrap. They put it into orbit around Canis Lambda. And as if for insult, they paired it with a merely mile-thick lump of metal to mark the place where it should be when they wanted to find it. And then ships could make use of Canis Lambda. It was a checkpoint which could be seen and used for aiming from very far away. Ships steered for it. They broke out of overdrive and were assured of clear space to the next checkpoint on this space lane or that by a tinny voice from the buoy saying; “Checkpoint Lambda. Checkpoint Lambda. Report. Report.” And then the man-made ships went on, having made use of Canis Lambda despite itself.
But now this would end. The space buoy would be destroyed by four of the Five Comets acting together, with the fifth coming along a little later to make sure. And then men wouldn’t try to use Canis Lambda again.
Scott didn’t think of the situation in those terms, of course, but the universe as he saw it from the hull plates of Lambda did not look warm or comforting or hospitable. Where he stood he was in unshielded sunshine from the knees up. His space suit glittered. Over his head the marker-asteroid loomed,—menacingly, it seemed. Behind him, the curve of Lambda’s hull showed the sunlight forming a slightly wavery terminator between the utter darkness of shadow and the intolerable glare of the sun. But after a moment the shadow was not absolute black. There was some light reflected from the marker-asteroid, like moonlight on Earth and earthlight on the moon. In it he could see the edges of the plating. But the contrast between the lower parts of his legs on the side from which the sunlight came and the blazing brightness of the rest was extraordinary.
The mist which was the visible part of the comets was lighted by the sun, but it cast no shade. It was too thin. Scott could see to the farthest forward part of Lambda’s hull with complete clarity. Even a mile or two miles of distance showed no change. There was no fogging of any detail of the marker-asteroids’ surface. He could see the same scars he’d noted from the control room now hours ago. They were proof that like the planet Mercury of the First System, the asteroid always turned the same face toward its sun. Its day and night were endless.
All this was normal enough. The truly daunting thing was the total extinction of all but a very few of the brightest stars, and those stars ones that Lambda left behind. The buoy was partly into the misty mass which was the head of the first of the Five Comets. The mist wouldn’t blur the stars in scores of miles, but in thousands it would extinguish them. It had before. Yet it offered no resistance to the buoy’s motion along its orbit. Scott’s body penetrated it at the same orbital speed, but he felt no wind. There was none. Even though the mist was present and visible in a vast volume of space, it was nevertheless more nearly a vacuum than physics laboratories could produce.
He turned and plodded toward the buoy’s bow. He was infinitely alone—a small, glittering homunculus on a shining golden shape, which itself was minute compared to the very minor asteroid under two miles away. And the asteroid itself was an inconsiderable speck in a planetless solar system.
His magnetic-soled shoes felt sticky. Each shoe-sole had to be separated from adhesion to the steel by a process most painfully learned in space. There must be no jerk, or the other foot might be jolted loose, too. To walk an actually straight line was proof of great skill and much experience. The sounds of his footsteps were loud, because there was no other sound at all—at least, not for some minutes.