“What happened?”
“Plenty. We got the whole story from the picrecording tapes inside and outside of your ship. You cut Xantippe all to pieces. You incidentally got Bort Brecht started on the Hartley family, which later literally cut him to pieces. It cost three lives, but Xantippe is through.”
“Then—I destroyed the projector, or whatever it was—”
“You destroyed Xantippe. You—killed Xantippe. The planet was a . . . a thing that I hardly dare think about. You ever see a hydromedusa here on Earth?”
“You mean one of those jellyfish that floats on the surface of the sea and dangles paralyzing tentacles down to catch fish?”
“That’s it. Like a Portugese man-of-war. Well, that was Xantippe, with that strange mind field about her for her tentacles. A space dweller; she swept up anything that came her way, killed what was killable, digested what was digestible to her. Examination of the pictures, incidentally, shows that she was all set to hurl out a great cloud of spores. One more revolution about Betelgeuse and she’d have done it.”
“How come I went under like that?” I was beginning to remember.
“You weren’t as well protected as the others. You see, when we trained that crew we carefully split the personalities; paranoiac hatred to carry them through the field and an instant reversion to manic depressive under the influence of the field. But yours was the only personality we couldn’t split. So you were the leader—you were delegated to do the job. All we could do to you was to implant a desire to destroy Xantippe. You did the rest. But when the psychic weight of the field was lifted from you, your mind collapsed. We had a sweet job rebuilding it, too, let me tell you!”
“Why all that business about the ‘one sane man’?”
Renn grinned. “That was to keep the rest of the crew fairly sure of themselves, and to keep you from the temptation of taking over before you reached the field, knowing that the rest, including the captain, were not responsible for their actions.”
“What about the others, after the field disappeared?”
“They reverted to something like normal. Not quite, though. The quartermaster tied up the rest of the crew just before they reached Earth and handed them over to us as Insurrectionist spies!
“But as for you, there’s a command waiting for you if you want it.”
“I want it,” I said. He clapped me on the shoulder and left. Then they brought me a man-sized dinner.
James H. Schmitz
Here’s another ominous region of space from which few ships have returned. The two undercover agents were aware of that (one of them painfully so), but their job at hand was getting the goods on a smuggling operation that was stealing valuable items from a scientific repository. Then a ship full of well-armed smugglers showed up. And so did a thing from that deadly region of lost starships, looking for something that had been stolen from its domain . . .
James H. Schmitz (1911-1981) was a master of action-adventure science fiction, notably his stories of the Hub, a loosely-bound confederation of star systems. His most popular characters were Telzey Amberdon, the spunky teenage telepath, and Trigger Argee, a crack shot with a gun and reflexes that made lighting look lethargic. His most popular novel, The Witches of Karres, though not part of the Hub universe, is a classic space opera. Many of his sf adventure tales have scary moments, and this one has them in spades.
THE SEARCHER
James H. Schmitz
It was night in that part of the world of Mezmiali—deep night, for much of the sky was obscured by the dense cosmic cloud called the Pit, little more than two light-years away. Overhead, only a scattering of nearby stars twinkled against the sullen gloom of the cloud. Far to the east, its curving edges were limned in brilliance, for beyond it, still just below the horizon, blazed the central sun clusters of the Hub.
The landscaped private spaceport was well lit but almost deserted. A number of small ships stood about in their individual stations, and two watchmen on a pair of float scooters were making a tour of the grounds, moving along unhurriedly twenty feet up in the air. They weren’t too concerned about intruders—the ships were locked and there was little else of value around to steal. But their duties included inspecting the area every two hours, and they were doing it.
One of them checked his scooter suddenly, said through his mike, “Take a look at Twenty-two, will you!”
His companion turned his head in the indicated direction. The ship at Station Twenty-two was the largest one here at present, an interstellar yacht which had berthed late in the afternoon, following an extensive pleasure cruise. He stared in surprise, asked, “Nobody on board, is there?”
The first watchman was checking his list. “Not supposed to be until tomorrow. She’s getting a standard overhaul then. What do you suppose that stuff is?”
The stuff he referred to looked like a stream of pale, purple fire welling silently out of the solid hull of the yacht, about halfway up its side. It flowed down along the side of the ship, vanishing as it touched the ground—appeared actually to be pouring on unchecked through the base of Station Twenty-two into the earth. Both men had glanced automatically at the radiation indicators on the scooters and found them reassuringly inactive. But it was a puzzling, eerie sight.
“It’s new to me!” the other man said uneasily. “Better report it right away! There might be somebody on board, maybe messing around with the engines. Wait a moment. It’s stopping!”
They looked on in silence as the last of the fiery flow slid down the yacht, disappeared soundlessly into the station’s foundation.
The first watchman shook his head.
“I’ll call the super,” he said. “He’ll—”
A sharp whistling rose simultaneously from the two radiation indicators. Pale fire surged out of the ground beneath the scooters, curved over them, enclosing the men and their vehicles. For a moment, the figures of the watchmen moved convulsively in a shifting purple glow; then they appeared to melt, and vanished. The fire sank back to the ground, flowed down into it. The piercing clamor of the radiation indicators faded quickly to a whisper and ended.
The scooters hung in the air, motionless, apparently undamaged. But the watchmen were gone.
Eighty yards underground, the goyal lay quiet while the section it had detached to assimilate the two humans who had observed it as it left the ship returned and again became a part of it. It was a composite of billions of units, an entity now energy, now matter, vastly extensible and mobile in space, comparatively limited in the heavy mediums of a planet. At the moment, it was close to its densest material form, a sheet of unseen luminescence in the ground, sensor groups probing the spaceport area to make sure there had been no other witnesses to its arrival on Mezmiali.
There appeared to have been none. The goyal began to drift underground toward a point on the surface of the planet about a thousand miles away from the spaceport. . . .
And, about a thousand miles away, in the direction the goyal was heading, Danestar Gems raked dark-green fingerðnails through her matching dark-green hair, and swore nervously at the little spy-screen she’d been manipulating.
Danestar was alone at the moment, in a small room of the University League’s Unclassified Specimens Depot on Mezmiali. The Depot was composed of a group of large, heavily structured, rather ugly buildings, covering about the area of an average village, which stood in the countryside far from any major residential sections. The buildings were over three centuries old and enclosed as a unit by a permanent energy barrier, presenting to the world outside the appearance of a somewhat flattened black dome which completely concealed the structures.