“Thanks,” Simon said. “Have you ever been there?”
“Never have been and never will,” the captain said. “It’s off-limits, tabu, forbidden. Many millennia ago one of our ships landed there. I don’t know what happened, since the information is classified. But after the ship gave its report, the authorities ordered all ships to steer clear of that sector of space. I’ve heard some wild rumors about what the explorers encountered, but, true or not, they’re enough to convince me to suppress my curiosity.”
“Pretty bad?” Simon said.
“Pretty bad.”
“Maybe the horrible thing was that the Clerun-Gowph had the answer to the primal question.”
“I’ll let you find out,” the captain said.
21
THE END OF THE LINE
“It doesn’t matter what it is, somebody will find a way to make a profit off of it.”
This was a quotation from one of Somers’ novels, The Sargasso Sea of Space. In this, John Clayter’s fuelless ship gets sucked into a whirlpool in space, a strange malformation of space-time near the rim of the universe. Everything that floats loose in the cosmos eventually drifts into this area. Clayter isn’t surprised to find wrecked spaceships, garbage, and tired comets whirling around and around here. But he is startled when he discovers that thoughts also end up here. Thoughts are electrical radiations, and so they, like gravity, go on and on, spreading out through the world. The Sargasso Sea has the peculiar property of amplifying these, and John Clayter almost goes nuts from being bombarded by them. The triviality of most of them drives him to thoughts of suicide, and since these are also amplified and bounced back at him, as if they were in an echo chamber, he has to get out fast or die.
He is saved when he stumbles across a spaceship of the Kripgacers. This race is in the business of salvaging thoughts, polishing them up a bit, and reselling them. Their biggest customer is Earth.
Simon was reminded of this when he landed on his next-to-last stop. This was a planet whose natives were still in the Old Stone Age. They were being enslaved and exploited by aliens from a distant galaxy, the Felckorleers. These were corralling the kangaroo-like aborigines and sticking them in iron igloos. The walls of the igloos were lined with organic matter, mostly hay and the hair the Felckorleers had shaved off their captives. After the aborigines had sat in the igloos for a week, they were hustled out and into a spaceship. The poor natives were radiating a blue aura by then, and their captors avoided touching them directly. They herded them along with ten-foot poles.
Simon watched three ships loaded with the natives take off for parts unknown. “What are you doing to them?” he asked a Felckorleer.
“Making a few bucks,” the thing said. He explained that the blue bubbles contained sex energy. Since the bubbles were so thick, not yet thinned out by distance from their point of origin, they contained a terrific sexual voltage. They passed through metal, but organic objects soaked them up. Hence, the igloos designed to concentrate the bubble energy. The aborigines thrown into them absorbed the voltage.
“Then we transport them to the other side of the universe,” the Felckorleer said proudly. “The races there have a very poor sex drive because they get only the last gasp of the bubbles. So we provide them a much needed service. We sell them the gooks we’ve loaded with the blue stuff, and they embrace them. The blue stuff is like electricity, it flows to a lower potential. And our customers, the lower potential, get a big load of sex. For a while, anyway.”
“What happens to the aborigines?” Simon said.
“They die. The blue stuff also seems to be the essence of life itself. When they’re grabbed by a customer, they lose every last trickle of energy. Too bad. If they survived, we could run them back here and load them up again. But we’re not going to run out of carriers. They breed like mad, you know.”
“Doesn’t your conscience ever hurt you?” Simon said.
The Felckorleer looked surprised. “What for? What use are the natives here? They don’t do anything. You can see for yourself they’re uncivilized.”
If Simon had been John Clayter, he would have rescued the aborigines and turned the Felckorleers over to the Intergalactic Police. But there wasn’t a thing he could do. And if he protested, he might find himself in an igloo.
In a sad mood, he left the planet. But he was basically, that is, genetically, an optimist. By the second day, he felt happy. Perhaps this change was caused by his eagerness to get to the Clerun-Gowph. He ordered the ship to go at top speed, even though the screaming from the 69X drive was almost unbearable. On the fourth day, he saw the desired star dead ahead, shimmering, waving behind the blue bubbles. Three minutes later, he was slowing down, and the screaming died down after most of the necessary braking had been done. At a crawling fifty thousand miles an hour, he approached the planet while his heart beat with mingled dread and exultation.
The world of the Clerun-Gowph was huge. It was dumbbell-shaped, actually two planets connected by a shaft. Each was the size of the planet Jupiter, which had an equatorial diameter of about 88,700 miles compared to Earth’s 7,927 miles. This worried Simon, since the gravity would be so great it would flatten him as if he were soup poured into a coffee saucer. But the computer assured him that the gravity was no higher than Earth’s. This meant that the two planets and the shaft were hollow. As it turned out, this was right. The Clerun-Gowph had removed the iron core of their native planet and made another planet out of the metal. This addition housed the biggest computer in the world. It also contained the factories for making the blue bubbles, which rose out of millions of openings.
The two planets rotated on their longitudinal axis and also whirled around a common center of gravity, located in the connecting shaft. A dumbbell-shaped atmosphere covered the planets, and over this lay a thick blanket of the blue stuff.
Simon directed the Hwang Ho to land on the original planet, since this was the only one that had soil and water. On minimum drive, it lowered itself through the blue and then the air. Simon got an enormous erection and aching testicles when descending through the blue layer, but these symptoms disappeared after he’d passed through the blue shield. The ship headed for the biggest city, and after a few minutes it was low enough so that Simon could see the natives. They looked like giant cockroaches.
Near the biggest building in the city was a large meadow. This was surrounded by thousands of the Clerun-Gowph, and on its edge was a band playing weird instruments. Simon wondered who they were honoring, and it wasn’t until he was about twenty feet above the meadow that he suddenly guessed. They were assembled to greet him.
This scared him. How had they known that he was coming? They must be very wise and far-seeing indeed to have anticipated his visit.
The next moment, he was even more scared. The 69X drive, which had not been making a sound at this low speed, screamed. Simon and the dog and the owl leaped into the air. The scream rose to a near ear-shattering level and then abruptly died. At the same time, the ship fell.
Simon woke a moment later. His left leg and his banjo were broken. Anubis was licking his face; Athena was flying around and around shrieking; the port was open; a hideous face, all multifaceted eyes, mandibles, and antennae, was looking in. Simon tried to sit up to greet the thing, but the pain made him faint again.
When he awoke a second time, he was in a giant bed in a building that was obviously a hospital. This time, he had no pain. In fact, he could get up and walk as well as ever. This astounded him, so he asked the attendant how his leg had been fixed up. He was astounded again when the cockroachoid replied in English.