“Listen,” Ross said. “I’ll tell you what happened down there. I’ll show you what happened!”
They stared at him in paralyzing horror as he threw the ship around and headed back.
“What are you doing!” Mickey cried.
“Listen,” Ross said. “Didn’t you understand me? Don’t you see how we’ve been tricked?”
They looked at him without comprehension. Mickey took a step toward him.
“Alien race,” Ross said. “That’s the short of it. That time-space idea is all wet. But I’ll tell you what idea isn’t all wet. So we leave the place. That’s our first instinct as far as reporting it? Saying it’s uninhabitable? We’d do more than that. We wouldn’t report it at all.”
“Ross, you’re not taking us back!” Mason said, standing up suddenly as the full terror of returning struck him.
“You bet I am!” Ross said, fiercely elated.
“You’re crazy!” Mickey shouted at him, his body twitching, his hands clenched at his sides menacingly.
“Listen to me!” Ross roared at them. “Who would be benefited by us not reporting the existence of that planet?”
They didn’t answer. Mickey moved closer.
“Fools!” he said. “Isn’t it obvious? There is life down there. But life that isn’t strong enough to kill us or chase us away with force. So what can they do? They don’t want us there. So what can they do?”
He asked them like a teacher who cannot get the right answers from the dolts in his class.
Mickey looked suspicious. But he was curious now, too, and a little timorous as he had always been with his captain, except in moments of greatest physical danger. Ross had always led them, and it was hard to rebel against it even when it seemed he was trying to kill them all. His eyes moved to the viewer screen where the planet began to loom beneath them like a huge dark ball.
“We’re alive,” Ross said, “and I say there never was a ship down there. We saw it, sure. We touched it. But you can see anything if you believe it’s there! All your senses can tell you there’s something when there’s nothing. All you have to do is believe it!”
“What are you getting at?” Mason asked hurriedly, too frightened to realize. His eyes fled to the altitude gauge. Seventeen thousand … sixteen thousand … fifteen …
“Telepathy,” Ross said, triumphantly decisive. “I say those men, or whatever they are, saw us coming. And they didn’t want us there. So they read our minds and saw the death fear, and they decided that the best way to scare us away was to show us our ship crashed and ourselves dead in it. And it worked … until now.”
“So it worked!” Mason exploded. “Are you going to take a chance on killing us just to prove your damn theory?”
“It’s more than a theory!” Ross stormed, as the ship fell, then Ross added with the distorted argument of injured vanity, “My orders say to pick up specimens from every planet. I’ve always followed orders before and, by God, I still will!”
“You saw how cold it was!” Mason said. “No one can live there anyway! Use your head, Ross!”
“Damn it, I’m captain of this ship!” Ross yelled. “And I give the orders!”
“Not when our lives are in your hands!” Mickey started for the captain.
“Get back!” Ross ordered.
That was when one of the ship’s engines stopped and the ship yawed wildly.
“You fool!” Mickey exploded, thrown off balance. “You did it, you did it!”
Outside the black night hurtled past.
The ship wobbled violently. Prediction true was the only phrase Mason could think of. His own vision of the screaming, the numbing horror, the exhortations to a deaf heaven – all coming true. That hulk would be this ship in a matter of minutes. Those three bodies would be …
“Oh … damn!” He screamed it at the top of his lungs, furious at the enraging stubbornness of Ross in taking them back, of causing the future to be as they saw – all because of insane pride.
“No, they’re not going to fool us!” Ross shouted, still holding fast to his last idea like a dying bulldog holding its enemy fast in its teeth.
He threw switches and tried to turn the ship. But it wouldn’t turn. It kept plunging down like a fluttering leaf. The gyroscope couldn’t keep up with the abrupt variations in cabin equilibrium and the three of them found themselves being thrown off balance on the tilting deck.
“Auxiliary engines!” Ross yelled.
“It’s no use!” Mickey cried.
“Damn it!” Ross clawed his way up the angled deck, then crashed heavily against the engine board as the cabin inclined the other way. He threw switches over with shaking fingers.
Suddenly Mason saw an even spout of flame through the rear viewer again. The ship stopped shuddering and headed straight down. The cabin righted itself.
Ross threw himself into his chair and shot out furious hands to turn the ship about. From the floor Mickey looked at him with a blank, white face. Mason looked at him, too, afraid to speak.
“Now shut up!” Ross said disgustedly, not even looking at them, talking like a disgruntled father to his sons. “When we get down there you’re going to see that it’s true. That ship’ll be gone. And we’re going to go looking for those bastards who put the idea in our minds!”
They both stared at their captain humbly as the ship headed down backwards. They watched Ross’s hands move efficiently over the controls. Mason felt a sense of confidence in his captain. He stood on the deck quietly, waiting for the landing without fear. Mickey got up from the floor and stood beside him, waiting.
The ship hit the ground. It stopped. They had landed again. They were still the same. And …
“Turn on the spotlight,” Ross told them.
Mason threw the switch. They all crowded to the port. Mason wondered for a second how Ross could possibly have landed in the same spot. He hadn’t even appeared to be following the calculations made on the last landing.
They looked out.
Mickey stopped breathing. And Ross’s mouth fell open.
The wreckage was still there.
They had landed in the same place and they had found the wrecked ship still there. Mason turned away from the port and stumbled over the deck. He felt lost, a victim of some terrible universal prank, a man accursed.
“You said…” Mickey said to the captain.
Ross just looked out of the port with unbelieving eyes.
“Now we’ll go up again,” Mickey said, grinding his teeth. “And we’ll really crash this time. And we’ll be killed. Just like those … those…”
Ross didn’t speak. He stared out of the port at the refutation of his last clinging hope. He felt hollow, void of all faith in belief in sensible things.
Then Mason spoke.
“We’re not going to crash –” he said somberly –”ever.”
“What?”
Mickey was looking at him. Ross turned and looked too.
“Why don’t we stop kidding ourselves?” Mason said. “We all know what it is, don’t we?”
He was thinking of what Ross had said just a moment before. About the senses giving evidence of what was believed. Even if there was nothing there at all …
Then, in a split second, with the knowledge, he saw Ross and he saw Carter. As they were. And he took a short shuddering breath, a last breath until illusion would bring breath and flesh again.
“Progress,” he said bitterly, and his voice was an aching whisper in the phantom ship. “The Flying Dutchman takes to the universe.”
RIPPLES IN THE DIRAC SEA
Geoffrey A. Landis