A shield slid away and Liz saw the cell-deck. A Security guard came across, to be introduced as Pete. Liz waved to him, but she barely noticed his polite smile, nor his brief welcoming words. She was spellbound, rooted to the spot, dazed by the sight of the unconscious expellees in the eerie green subdued lights of the enormous hold.
It was so much bigger than she expected. And nothing had prepared Liz for the shock of seeing rows of tanks, each with its gently swaying body cushioned by a grayish ooze. Tup had spoken of a Chamber of Horrors. It was. The unconscious figures were subtly sinister, like so many effigies of once-fearsome men and women. Liz tried to control her shaking hands. She felt fear, sensed it deep within her body.
“They don’t feel a thing!” declared Tup. Wrapped up in her own reaction as she was, Liz could recognize a change in the young man’s tone. He, too, sensed the chilled malice that emanated from the scores of tanks.
A green iridescence picked out the features of the expellees. Young, old, some women but mostly men. Near-naked bodies bobbed in a pulsating ooze. All the minds blotted out, monitored by machines below the tanks. There was no rational cause for fear, thought Liz. But she felt fear. It was not the corpselike appearance of the expellees, nor the eerie glow of the subdued lighting, nor yet the soft squelching of the ooze as bodies slipped and slid about the tanks; none of these things mattered, for she knew that they were held in a state of unconsciousness deep below the normal level of sleep. The cause of her fear was other than these.
Tup laughed. It was a young man’s reaction, thoughtless and without malice. “There’s nothing to worry about!” he added at once. “They can’t harm you!”
She knew it. Yet there was a sense of ragged, contained violence in the cell-deck. She shuddered, conscious of the empty stares of the unconscious expellees. “It’s their eyes,” said Liz. Pete nodded. “It’s something you have to get used to.”
All three looked into the nearest coma-cell where a large and powerfully-built yet flabby man lay. His eyes seemed to transfix them with a straining, questioning intensity.
Liz shuddered again. Empty eyes, glaring into the emptiness of empty dreams.
“Is that him?” She knew she spoke as if the man in the tank could hear. There was a hostile quality in Tup’s voice when he replied: “That’s Maran.”
CHAPTER 5
The Singularity was near.
Already the vague emanations from its strange depths were impinging upon the sensitive scanners of the station. On the operations screen, which occupied almost the whole of one side of the bridge, an image of the coordinates of the Singularity was forming. Pulsing with a vicious energy, the bizarre space-time event announced its presence. Trails of discontinuous energy fields scored the region inhabited by the Singularity. It was a leprous patch on the screen, a corroding and waiting beast poised, grim, blind. Buchanan knew the configuration of the Singularity. Its unquestioned dangers he admitted; but they held no terrors for him. Soon, the robots would loose the tug and when it fell away he would point the station directly into the maw of the Singularity. But now he had other considerations. Kochan had spoken in terms that had urged new fears into his mind. The passengers and crew of the Altair Star were lost—dead, irretrievably gone, lost. Buchanan’s self-appointed task was to find why the robots had given up so easily; why they had announced that no action on their part—or on the part of any human, by implication, since they regarded themselves as far superior to humans—could possibly do anything to save the huge liner. And that task had seemed enough. To find the reason for the loss of his ship. But now there was more. Kochan had loosed fresh devils to haunt him.
Was it possible that, within the vast, rotating phenomenon, the victims of the tragedy were held in a fantastic chronoclasm?
Buchanan fed instructions to the sensor-pads in his palms. The screen cleared, pulsed with dim light, and then projected a fresh image. Buchanan stared for minutes, watching the ship’s progress. The ship—the station—coasted easily along the inner arm of a spiraling vortex that helped flip it, like some cosmic slingshot, toward the dark regions: always with economy and efficiency toward the Singularity. The ship was being handled superbly. He admitted it. He had hours now, hours in which to think over Kochan’s new and frightening ideas.
He approached the robotic controller and spoke to the cone-shaped pedestaclass="underline" “The Singularity,” he said.
“Sir?” grated a metallic voice.
“Mr. Kochan left information. Give it. Begin.”
“Yes, sir.”
Buchanan watched. With growing dismay, he saw graphs, readings, projections: the foundation of Kochan’s fears. It was possible.
“That’s Maran,” agreed the guard.
The three of them looked at the lax body. A slow surge within the tank brought the bulk of the chest and belly higher. It was like the surfacing of some great creature from the lower depths. But for the eyes, it might have been a comic sight.
Liz shivered. Here was the source of the unease in the cell-deck.
“Miss, why don’t you go and look at the rest of the ship?”
The Security guard indicated a wide grav-chute at the far end of the cavernous hold. At the same time a slight shake of his head alerted Tup to Liz’s state of shock. Tup was perceptive.
“Not more like this!” Liz shuddered.
“No!” Tup said at once. “Come on, Miss Deffant—you have to see the survival-pods. What’s in them, how they’re launched. You’ll be interested—you’ve done some pioneering.” He took her arm, for once unembarrassed. “It wasn’t such a good idea bringing you down here. We’ll go down to the deck below.”
Liz allowed herself to be led past the rows of green-glowing tanks. She tried to avoid the empty stares of the expellees, but it was difficult. If she had been properly in control of herself and able to state her inclination, she would have asked to be returned to her cabin. But the slightly dazed and considerably fearful state of mind that troubled her made her suggestible. She followed Tup to a grav-chute at the far end of the cell-deck and again found herself floating downward to the further recesses of the great infragalactic vessel.
Tup rattled on cheerfully about the method of propelling the prisoners once they reached the far star at the Rim. Small, individual craft took the awakening expellees to their new lives.
“Here they are!” Tup announced. She was in a huge cargo hold. But this deck was bright and cheerful. No lines of tanks, no eerie half-lights, nothing one could easily associate with the Enforcement Service. The hold was full, however.
Liz saw scores of tall white cylinders, each one about twice the height of a man. Their purpose was obvious.
“The survival pods,” said Tup. He pointed to a small lock. “That’s where we launch them—all automatically. The expellees are shunted down here by the robot servitors, then they’re taken through a fairly slow revivifying process. When they wake up, they’re in a glide path.” Liz inspected one of the cylinders. She made out the small propulsion unit.
“We carried individual life rafts something like them, but not so small as these.”
“They’re not designed for deep-space use—though they would last for about six hours. We launch the expellees at predetermined coordinates that give them a flight of only a few minutes. Want to see inside one?”
Liz shook her head. She was still shivering, though the temperature in the hold was tolerable, comfortable even. Tup was disappointed. “Doubt if you’ll get the chance again,” he offered. “It’s bending regulations to open them, but you’d be interested.” He grinned, shy once more as he realized they were alone. “I had Pete program you on the console as a crew-member. Coming?”