Chapter Three
He was neither asleep nor awake. For eons it seemed that he lay still, enveloped in softness, yearning for sleep that did not quite come. The thunder and thrum of engines had taken on a musical quality, a militant beat repeated over and over and over like an ancient disc record caught in a groove.
Around him was blackness, impenetrable space blackness, but there were no stars, no planets. Muffled sounds came to him that he could not identify, and he felt waves of nausea passing through him. Then, with incredible suddenness the blackness was shattered by a piercing light as a first-magnitude star burst into violent flame, sending out streamers of color.
Lars opened his eyes, and the immensity of space collapsed around him, shrinking into the tiny bunk compartment, and the star became the wall light. John Lambert was standing by his bunk, swabbing his arm with alcohol.
“What—?”
“Just lie still and try to relax,” Lambert said gently. “You’ll be out of it.”
Lars tried to sit up, but the straps still held him down. “Out of it? Out of what?”
“Reaction, of course.” Lampert swabbed his arm again and set the syringe aside. “Koenig drive sets up some very odd sensations, particularly if you’ve never been through it before. Feeling better now?”
Lars nodded dizzily and unstrapped himself. After a moment he slipped down to the deck.
Peter Brigham’s bunk was empty.
“They needed him in the navigation shack, so I broke him loose first,” Lambert said.
“How long—?”
“Seven hours or so. I checked half an hour ago and you were still out like a punch-drunk fighter.”
Lars rubbed his forehead gingerly. “I feel like one, too. Does it always hit you like this?”
“More or less. You learn to modify it after a while. It’s as much a psychological reaction as anything else. You’re no longer legitimately a part of space-time as we normally know it. Just a kind of a bubble slicing through it crosswise, you might say. Though the math boys would squirm if you put it that way. They’ve got a lot of fancy terms for the Koenig distortion field.”
“I bet.” Lars sank down on the bunk, still trying to orient himself. He felt as if he’d been sleeping for weeks. “Then we’re on our way!”
“Yes, we very decidedly are on our way and then some. I would hate to have to bicycle home from here.”
“But we’re not on our way to Vega.” It wasn’t a question the way Lars said it. It was a statement.
Lambert stopped rewrapping the syringe and looked up, startled. Then he laughed. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said.”
“Somebody in your family a telep? Or are you just looking in your crystal ball?”
“I haven’t been able to work tele-dice since I was six,” Lars said doggedly. “You don’t need to be a telepath to know that something is very strange about this little jaunt.”
“Like what?”
Lars told him what Peter had said about the coordinates, about his own suspicions. He started to tell him what he had surmised about the cargo in the hold, but stopped. Something deep inside him seemed to be crying out, warning him. Don’t play all your cards at once.
Lambert listened to him, and shook his head. “Sounds like you’ve done some fancy putting-together-of-two-and-two,” he said finally. “And you’re at least partly right, of course. The Ganymede isn’t going to Vega III. But I don’t know where she is going. All I know is that she blasted under secret orders, and that every high mucky-muck in the Colonial Service is nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof about her mission, whatever it is. This seems to be a very special-type trip.”
“But they can’t just shoot two dozen men out to nowhere without telling them where they’re going!” Lars protested. “It’s—it’s against the law.”
“You’ll find that the Colonial Service does pretty much whatever it pleases, my boy, law or no law,” Lambert said dryly. “What are you going to do about it? Protest? Whom are you going to protest to? You’re in deep space.”
“But Commander Fox—”
Lambert smiled. “I wouldn’t go howling to Walter Fox too quickly, if I were you. For one thing, he’s called a meeting of the crew for an hour from now and may have some news for everybody then. Meanwhile, how would you like a glimpse at what deep space looks like?”
The starboard observation pit was in darkness when they entered. “We keep the opacifiers in operation in case anyone comes in unprepared,” Lambert said. “Watch now!”
He pulled a switch and the pit was flooded with brilliant light. At first Lars thought it came from within the ship; then he saw that it was coming in through the huge observation dome as the opacifiers slid out of contact. Lars stared, his jaw dropping at the brilliant display that lay before him.
He had expected vast blackness, inky blackness studded with myriad brilliant pinpoints of light. He had taken training runs from Earth to the Moon on several occasions, runs made under chemical- and atomic-thrust engines alone, and at those times that was what deep space had looked like—huge, and empty, and lonely. That had been an awesome sight to see, the view of deep space that the earliest pioneers trying for the stars must have seen from year’s end to year’s end on the Long Passage.
But this was incredibly different, and incredibly awesome and beautiful. Running about the ship like a brilliant envelope a yard from the hull plates was a shimmering orange glow, flickering like tiny tongues of flame, surrounding the ship with fire. Beyond that there was no blackness, no sign of star-lights. Instead there were staggering flashes of brilliant light: orange, yellow, blue, violet, cutting impossibly complex patterns of color on the pale gray background. It was as though the ship were in the middle of a rapidly turning kaleidoscope, hanging poised in the shifting, whirling geometrical patterns, brilliant in their color, frightening in their intensity, in the very alienness of the impressions they made on the human eye.
Lars knew there was no alienness there, only a distortion of space and time, wrenched out of normal shape by the energy of the Koenig drive. What he was seeing was only the reflection of twisted, tortured energy-channels altered violently by the Koenig field. Not until the drive was finally shut off would the familiar pattern of black space and brilliant stars return to view. But then it would be a new star system, a new region of the galaxy with unfamiliar patterns of brightness to see.
He shut his eyes, dizzily. You could only watch for a few moments before the hypnotic luminosity became too dazzling. Lambert snapped the opacifier on again and activated the lights in the chamber. “Surprise you?”
Lars nodded, grinning sheepishly. “I didn’t expect that.”
“That’s all right,” Lambert said. “You’re due for a few more surprises before this day-period is over, I think. Let’s get down for that meeting.”
It was an uneasy meeting.
Lars knew the moment he stepped into the small, compact lounge that he was by no means the only member of the crew who had sensed that everything was not right. The men were waiting in small groups, talking among themselves in low voices, casting sidelong glances at the forward hatchway leading to the control room section of the ship. Lars could see Peter Brigham across the room, talking rapidly to a thin, hungry-looking man with pale cheeks and prominent eyes, who blinked and nodded from time to time as he listened. Other men, coming past them, stopped to listen, bending nearer to Peter. From all the groups a hum of uneasiness arose, not angry, but not quite peaceful either.
Lambert raised his eyebrows, taking the room in at a glance, and Lars could see a shadow of worry cross his face. They took seats near the rear of the room. “Your young friend seems to be doing a lot of talking,” Lambert said.