In the ruins of the old spaceship libraries there were many descriptions of Terra’s moon. The scientific accounts put its orbital revolution at 271/3 days at a distance of 384,403 kilometers from the planet. Its bright albedo was remarked and attributed to its surface of glassy crystalline soil. There was a great amount of similar minutiae, important to Terrans because a moon base was in process of construction when the Old Ones came again. This satellite inspired poets to write of it incessantly, often in terms not faithful to astronomical fact. They frequently spoke of it in terms of silver, as “striding the night in silver shoon” or “gifting its silver smile to the still waters.”
If there were any poets upon the planet still composing, they spoke no more of a “silver orb.” The Old Ones had sculpted the satellite into a five-pointed construction, angry red-orange in color, mottled with pyramidal protrusions disposed in groups of five, a geometry vaguely suggesting the shapes of the crania of the Old Ones. The rubble from this immense project was still falling upon Terra in shower after shower of meteors and meteorites. This was one reason Ship was cloaked in the guise of a meteor. So many of such bodies were striking Terran atmosphere, it had been thought that we might be undistinguished amid the number of them.
On such frail hopes and forlorn details our enterprise depended.
I could not always keep my apprehensions at bay. The four of us, with no useful experience to rely on, dropping through its sun-system to an obscure planet, no more than a speck on the outer shoals of this galaxy, our vessel disguised and ridged and pocked as if by collisions, a mote thousands of times smaller than the watery world toward which we drifted. What madness had come upon the Great Ones to entrust us with so important a mission?
Then it came to me that our ignorance and inexperience were the factors that had determined the choice. We were a more expendable crew than most of the other search teams. Those who had survived encounters and rescued Remnant groups would be sent to more prominent fronts to undertake larger and more urgent missions. Our little family was dispatched to an odd little corner of the conflict. If the Old Ones exterminated us, the loss would be relatively unimportant — unless we let slip, through carelessness or under stress, information that might help tease out the locations of important Alliance posts.
Dreadful but necessary measures had been installed to prevent that from happening.
We kept gazing at the ugly orange moon-sculpture as it filled twelve of our visiscreens. I thought that it seemed to pulse its coloration, the orange brightening and darkening at irregular intervals, but set the impression aside as an illusions born of tensed nerves.
“Navigator,” I said, “how fare we?”
He glanced at his instruments and sighed. “Well enough, I think, though there are some slight anomalies I cannot account for. Distances seem to change irrespective of our velocity.”
“Seeker?”
“I think the Starheads — I mean, the Old Ones — may be distressing the local space-weave,” she said. “They are probably constructing some of those colossal engines we were taught about. The energies exchanged are so enormous they may twist space-time here.”
Navigator said this might account for his observations.
Then Seeker asked us to fall quiet. “I may be feeling something,” she said. “Silence will help me to concentrate. I am picking up fearful emotions. At least, I think perhaps.”
“The crew will silence,” I said.
Seeker had spoken before of the fear the fugitives on Terra must be enduring and I understood that these would be stark and continuous, but I wondered how they would feel if they knew the extent of the Old Ones’ desecrations. World on world, across all the cosmos, were crumbled to rubble or blown away to radioactive cloud, millions of nations, tribes, and civilizations were mangled to bloody ruin, the grandest achievements of art, science, religion, and philosophy had gone dark like lights turned off on a space cruiser.
The Terrans had known something of the Old Ones before this time. They had learned, but they had forgotten — almost purposefully, it seemed. In one of the relic spaceship libraries was a long document concerning something called Miskatonic Expedition 1935. This exploration project had discovered in land- mass Australia “certain traces” the Old Ones had left “in rocks even then laid down a thousand million years. laid down before the true life of [Terra] had existed at all.” The Terrans, according to this history, knew about the struggles of the Old Ones against the “spawn” of Cthulhu and the abominable Mi-Go and about some of the interstellar subjugations and massacres. These things they knew, but when the ancient evils rose again from the sea or “seeped down” from the stars, they were not prepared.
Their lack of realization had been pointedly described by their best historian of Cthulhu and the Old Ones and Great Ones. He spoke candidly of their failure, imputing it to “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” He drew a dark, disheartening view of his species: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in a black sea of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
They had not voyaged far, but black infinity had come upon them, and few were left and those scattered few must endure miserable, terror- filled days and nights. These Terrans probably would not be counted among the greatest of races in the cosmos; they were not the widest thinkers or most accomplished builders or the most generous of spirit. Yet they had achieved things fine in their way, however modest. Their erasure would be a waste, pathetic if not tragic. They had struggled against the Old Ones, this planet full of nations. Now we four individuals must struggle against the same implacable force.
I ordered myself not to allow this mood of thought to dominate my spirit.
After the next sleep period, Seeker told us that she had located geographically the Terran telepath and her group. It was a family of four, including the mysterious ancillary member whose thoughts Seeker could partially read but only sometimes. “She too is a female, this other one, and, like the telepath, she has extremely limited language skills, so that it is difficult to understand her thought patterns. She mostly thinks without words and possesses sensory organs different from those of her companions. She may belong to a different species.”
“Yet you say she is not enslaved,” I said.
“It is an arrangement we do not have ourselves,” she said.
“Does she see herself as part of the group?”
“Yes. But I need more information.”
“We will now orbit-out three locator flyers,” I said. “They will triangulate the source-point of the telepathic signals, just as we rehearsed.”
Ship gave a slight lurch, having dispatched the flyers as I was speaking. Each flyer contained amplifiers to reinforce the signals from Terra. They transmitted simultaneously pictures of the planetscape to the ship screens and to Seeker’s mind. If all performed according to scheme, we would have pictures of the close environs of the Remnant family in eight hours or fewer.
But it was a tiring interlude for Seeker. I watched her at work, her neck and shoulders tense in concentration. I could see the muscles strain as she bent to her console. Her lightweight white robe emphasized her taut slenderness and she frowned and smiled alternately, as the signal strengthened or faded. I could almost read Seeker’s mind as she seined through the blasts of data she intook, making innumerable decisions almost instantaneously.
Doctor too was concentrating. Her mechanisms were now principally focused upon Seeker, monitoring her physical conditions to the finest detail. If something touched Seeker’s mind, the event would show on Doctor’s screens and she would decide whether Ship must go dark, maybe forever.