In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

MEDUSA Theodore Sturgeon

I wasn’t sore at them. I don’t know what they’d done to me, exactly—I knew that some of it wasn’t so nice, and that I’d probably never be the same again. But I was a volunteer, wasn’t I? I’d asked for it. I’d signed a paper authorizing the department of commerce of the league to use me as they saw fit. When they pulled me out of the fleet for routine examination, and when they started examinations that were definitely not routine, I didn’t kick. When they asked for volunteers for a project they didn’t bother to mention by name, I accepted it sight unseen. And now—

“How do you feel, Rip?” old Doc Renn wanted to know. He spoke to me easylike, with his chin on the backs of his hands and his elbows on the table. The greatest name in psychoscience, and he talks to me as if he were my old man. Right up there in front of the whole psycho board, too.

“Fine, sir,” I said. I looked around. I knew all the doctors and one or two of the visitors. All the medicos had done one job or another on me in the last three years. Boy, did they put me through the mill. I understood only a fraction of it all—the first color tests, for instance, and the electro-coordination routines. But that torture machine of Grenfell’s and that copper helmet that Winton made me wear for two months—talk about your nightmares! What they were doing to or for me was something I could only guess at. Maybe they were testing me for something. Maybe I was just a guinea pig. Maybe I was in training for something. It was no use asking, either. I volunteered, didn’t I?

“Well, Rip,” Doc Renn was saying, “It’s all over now—the preliminaries, I mean. We’re going ahead with the big job.”

“Preliminaries?” I goggled. “You mean to tell me that what I’ve been through for the last three years was all preliminaries?”

Renn nodded, watching me carefully. “You’re going on a little trip. It may not be fun, but it’ll be interesting.”

“Trip? Where to?” This was good news; the repeated drills on spaceship techniques, the refresher courses on astrogation, had given me a good-sized itch to get out into the black again.

“Sealed orders,” said Renn, rather sharply. “You’ll find out. The important thing for you to remember is that you have a very important role to play.” He paused. I could see him grimly ironing the snappiness out of his tone. Why in Canaan did he have to be so careful with me? “You will be put aboard a Forfield Super—the latest and best equipped that the league can furnish. Your job is to tend the control machinery, and to act as assistant astrogator no matter what happens. Without doubt, you will find your position difficult at times. You are to obey your orders as given, without question, and without the use of force where possible.”

This sounded screwy to me. “That’s all written up, just about word for word, in the ‘Naval Manual,’” I reminded him gently, “under ‘Duties of Crew.’ I’ve had to do all you said every time I took a ship out. Is there anything special about this one, that it calls for all this underlining?”

He was annoyed, and the board shuffled twenty-two pairs of feet. But his tone was still friendly, half-persuasive when he spoke. “There is definitely something special about this ship, and—its crew. Rip, you’ve come through everything we could hand you, with flying colors. Frankly, you were subgjected to psychic forces that were enough to drive a normal man quite mad. The rest of the crew—it is only fair to tell you—are insane. The nature of this expedition necessitates our manning the ship that way. Your place on the ship is a key position. Your responsibility is a great one.”

“Now—hold on, sir,” I said. “I’m not questioning your orders, sir, and I consider myself under your disposition. May I ask a few questions?”

He nodded.

“You say the crew is insane. Isn’t that a broad way of putting it—” I couldn’t help needling him; he was trying so hard to keep calm— “for a psychologist?”

He actually grinned. “It is. To be more specific, they’re schizoids—dual personalitites. Their primary egos are paranoiac. They’re perfectly rational except on the subject of their particular phobia—or mania as the case may be. The recessive personality is a manic depressive.”

Now, as I remembered it, most paranoiacs have delusions of grandeur coupled with a persecution mania. And a manic depressive is the “Yes master” type. They just didn’t mix. I took the liberty of saying as much to one of Earth’s foremost psychoscientists.

“Of course they don’t mix,” snapped Renn. “I didn’t say they did. There’s no interflowing egos in these cases. They are schizoids. The cleavage is perfect.”

I have a mole under my arm that I scratch when I’m thinking hard. I scratched it. “I didn’t know anything like that existed,” I said. Renn seemed bent on keeping this informal, and I was playing it to the limit. I sensed that this was the last chance I’d have to get any information about the expedition.

“There never were any cases like that until recently,” said Renn patiently. “Those men came out of our laboratories.”

“Oh. Sort of made-to-order insanity?”

He nodded.

“What on earth for, sir?”

“Sealed orders,” he said immediately. His manner became abrupt again. “You take off tomorrow. You’ll be put aboard tonight. Your commanding officer is Captain William Parks.” I grinned delightedly at this. Parks—the horny old fireater! They used to say of him that he could create sunspots by spitting straight up. But he was a real spaceman—through and through. “And don’t forget, Rip,” Renn finished. “There is only one sane man aboard that ship. That is all.”

I saluted and left.

A Forfield Super is as sweet a ship as anything ever launched. There’s none of your great noisy bulk pushed through the ether by a cityful of men, nor is it your completely automatic “Eyehope”—so called because after you slipped your master control tape into the automatic pilot you always said, “you’re on your way, you little hunk of tinfoil—I hope!”

With an eight-man crew, a Forfield can outrun and outride anything else in space. No rockets—no celestial helices—no other such clumsy nonsense drives it. It doesn’t go places by going—it gets there by standing still. By which I mean that the ship achieves what laymen call “Universal stasis.”

The Galaxy is traveling in an orbit about the mythical Dead Center at an almost incredible velocity. A Forfield, with momentum nullified, just stops dead while the Galaxy streams by. When the objective approaches, momentum is resumed, and the ship appears in normal space with only a couple of thousand miles to go. That is possible because the lack of motion builds up a potential in motion; motion, being a relative thing, produces a set of relative values.

Instead of using the terms “action” and “reaction” in speaking of the Forfield drive, we speak of “stasis” and “re-stasis.” I’d explain further but I left my spherical slide rule home. Let me add only that a Forfield can achieve stasis in regard to planetary, solar, galactic, or universal orbits. Mix ’em in the right proportions, and you get resultants that will take you anywhere, fast.

I was so busy from the instant I hit the deck that I didn’t have time to think of all the angles of this more-than-peculiar trip. I had to check and double-check every control and instrument from the milliammeter to the huge compound integrators, and with a twenty-four-hour deadline that was no small task. I also had to take a little instruction from a league master mechanic who had installed a couple of gadgets which had been designed and tested at the last minute expressly for this trip. I paid little attention to what went on round me. I didn’t even know the skipper was aboard until I rose from my knew before the integrators, swiveled around on my way to the control board, and all but knocked the old war horse off his feet.

“Rip! I’ll be damned!” he howled. “Don’t tell me—you’re not signed on here?”

“Yup,” I said. “Let go my hand, skipper—I got to be able to hold a pair of needle noses for another hour or so. Yeah, I heard you were going to captain this barrel. How do you like it?”

“Smooth,” he said, looking around, then bringing his grin back to me. He only grinned twice a year because it hurt his face; but when he did, he did it all over. “What do you know about the trip?”

“Nothing except that we have sealed orders.”

“Well, I’ll bet there’s some kind of a honkatonk at the end of the road,” said Parks. “You and I’ve been on . . . how many is it? Six? Eight . . . anyway, we’ve been on plenty of ships together, and we managed to throw a whingding ashore every trip. I hope we can get out Aldebaran way. I hear Susie’s place is under new management again. Heh! Remember the time we—”

I laughed. “Let’s save it, skipper. I’ve got to finish this check-up, and fast. But, man, it’s good to see you again.” We stood looking at each other, and then something popped into my head and I felt my smile washing off. What was it that Dr. Renn had said—“Remember there’s only one sane man aboard!” Oh, no—they hadn’t put Captain Parks through that! Why—

I said, “How do you—feel, cap’n?”

“Swell,” he said. He frowned. “Why? You feel all right?”

Not right then, I didn’t. Captain Parks batty? That was just a little bit lousy. If Renn was right—and he was always right—then his board had given Parks the works, as well as the rest of the crew. All but me, that is. I knew I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t feel crazy. “I feel fine,” I said.

“Well, go ahead then,” said Parks, and turned his back.

I went over to the control board, disconnected the power leads from the radioscope, and checked the dials. For maybe five minutes I felt the old boy’s eyes drilling into the nape of my neck, but I was too upset to say anything more. It got very quiet in there. Small noises drifted into the control room from other parts of the ship. Finally I heard his shoulder brush the doorpost as he walked out.

How much did the captain know about this trip? Did he know that he had a bunch of graduates from the laughing academy to man his ship? I tried to picture Renn informing Parks that he was a paranoiac and a manic depressive, and I failed miserably. Parks would probably take a swing at the doctor. Aw, it just didn’t make sense. It occurred to me that “making sense” was a criterion that we put too much faith in. What do you do when you run across something that isn’t even supposed to make sense?

I slapped the casing back on the radioscope, connected the leads, and called it quits. The speaker over the forward post rasped out, “All hands report to control chamber!” I started, stuck my tools into their clips under the chart table, and headed for the door. Then I remembered I was already in the control room, and subsided against the bulkhead.

They straggled in. All hands were in the pink, well fed and eager. I nodded to three of them, shook hands with another. The skipper came in without looking at me—I rather thought he avoided my eyes. He went straight forward, faced about and put his hands low enough on the canted control board so he could sit on them. Seabiscuit, the quartermaster, and an old shipmate of mine, came and stood beside me. There was an embarrassed murmur of voices while we all awaited the last two stragglers.

Seabiscuit whispered to me, “I once said I’d sail clear to Hell if Bill Parks was cap’n of the ship.”

I said, out of the side of my face, “So?”

“So it looks like I’m goin’ to,” said the Biscuit.

The captain called the roll. That crew was microscopically hand picked. I had heard every single one of the names he called in connection with some famous escapade or other. Harry Voight was our chemist. He is the man who kept two hundred passengers alive for a month with little more than a week’s supply of air and water to work with, after the liner crossed bows with a meteorite on the Pleione run. Bort Brecht was the engineer, a man who could do three men’s work with his artificial hand alone. He lost it in the Pretoria disaster. The gunner was Hoch McCoy, the guy who “invented” the bow and arrow and saved his life when he was marooned on an asteroid in the middle of a pack of poison-toothed “Jackrabbits.” The mechanics were Phil and Jo Hartley, twins, whose resemblance enabled them to change places time and again during the Insurrection, thus running bales of vital information to the league high command.

“Report,” he said to me.

“All’s well in the control chamber, sir,” I said formally.

“Brecht?”

“All’s well back aft, sir.”

“Quartermaster?”

“Stores all stored and stashed away, sir,” said the Biscuit.

Parke turned to the control board and threw a lever. The air locks slid shut, the thirty-second departure signal began to sound from the oscillator on the hull and from signals here and in the engineer’s chamber. Parks raised his voice to be heard over their clamor.

“I don’t know where we’re goin’,” he said, with an odd smile, “but—” the signals stopped, and that was deafening—“we’re on our way!”

The master control he had thrown had accomplished all the details of taking off—artificial gravity, “solar” and “planetary” stases, air pumps, humidifiers—everything. Except for the fact that there was suddenly no light streaming in through the portholes any more, there was no slightest change in sensation. Parks reached out and tore the seals off the tape slot on the integrators and from the door of the orders file. He opened the cubbyhold and drew out a thick envelope. There was something in my throat I couldn’t swallow.

He tore it open and pulled out eight envelopes and a few folded sheets of paper. He glanced at the envelopes and, with raised eyebrows, handed them to me. I took them. There was one addressed to each member of the crew. At a nod from the skipper, I distributed them. Parks unfolded his orders and looked at them.

“Orders,” he said. “By authority of the Solar League, pertaining to destination and operations of Xantippean Expedition No. 1.”

Startled glances were batted back and forth. Xantippe! No one had ever been to Xantippe. The weird, cometary planet of Betelgeuse was, and had always been, taboo—and for good reason.

Park’s voice was tight. “Orders to be read to crew by the captain immediately upon taking off.” The skipper went to the pilot chair, swiveled it, and sat down. The crew edged closer.

“The League congratulates itself on its choice of a crew for this most important mission. Out of twenty-seven hundred volunteers, these eight men survived the series of tests and conditioning exercises provided by the league.

“General orders are to proceed to Xantippe. Captain and crew have been adequately protected against the field. Object of the expedition is to find the cause of the Xantippe Field and to remove it.

“Specific orders for each member of the crew are enclosed under separate sealed covers. The crew is ordered to read these instructions, to memorize them, and to destroy the orders and envelopes. The league desires that these orders be read in strictest secrecy by each member of the crew, and that the individual contents of the envelopes be held as confidential until contrary orders are issued by the league.” Parks drew a deep breath and looked around at his crew.

They were a steady lot. There was evidence of excitement, of surprise, and in at least one case, of shock. But there was no fear. Predominantly, there was a kind of exultance in the spaceburned, hard-bitten faces. They bore a common glory, a common hatred. “That isn’t sensible,” I told myself. “It isn’t natural, or normal, or sane, for eight men to face madness, years of it, with that joyous light in their eyes. But then—they’re mad already, aren’t they? Aren’t they?”

It was catching, too. I began to hate Xantippe. Which was, I suppose, silly. Xantippe was a planet, of a sort. Xantippe never killed anybody. It drove them mad, that was all. More than mad—it fused their synapses, reduced them to quivering, mindless hulks, drooling, their useless minds turned supercargo in a useless body. Xantippe had snared ship upon ship in the old days; ships bound for the other planets of the great star. The mad planet used to blanket them in its mantle of vibrations, and they were never heard from again. It was years before the league discovered where the ships had gone, and then they sent patrols to investigate. They lost eighteen ships and thirty thousand men that way.

And then came the Forfield Drive. In the kind of static hyperspace which these ships inhabited, surely they would pass the field unharmed. There were colonists out there on the other planets, depending on supplies from Sol. There were rich sources of radon, uranium, tantalum, copper. Surely a Forfield ship could—

But they couldn’t. They were the first ships to penetrate the field, to come out on the other side. The ships were intact, but their crews could use their brains for absolutely nothing. Sure, I hated Xantippe. Crazy planet with its cometary orbit and its unpredictable complex ecliptic. Xantippe had an enomous plot afoot. It was stalking us—even now it was ready to pounce on us, take us all and drain our minds—

I shook myself and snapped out of it. I was dreaming myself into a case of the purple willies. If I couldn’t keep my head on my shoulders about this spacegoing padded cell, then who would? Who else could?

The crew filed out, muttering. Parks sat on the pilot’s chair, watching them, his bright gaze flitting from face to face. When they had gone, he began to watch me. Not look at me. Watch me. It made me sore.

“Well?” he said after a time.

“Well what?” I barked, insubordinately.

“Aren’t you going to read your bedtime story? I am.”

“Bed—oh.” I slit the envelope, unfolded my orders. The captain did likewise at the extreme opposite side of the chamber. I read:

“Orders by authority of the Solar League pertaining to course of action to be taken by Harl Ripley, astromechanic on Xantippean Expedition No. 1.

“Said Harl Ripley shall follow the rules and regulations as set forth in the naval regulations, up until such time as the ship engages the Xantippean Field. He is then to follow the orders of the master, except in case of the master’s removal from active duty from some unexpected cause. Should such an emergency arise, the command does not necessarily revert to said Harl Ripley, but to the crew member who with the greatest practicability outlines a plan for the following objective: The expedition is to land on Xantippe; if uninhabited, the planet is to be searched until the source of the field is found and destroyed. If inhabited, the procedure of the pro-tem commander must be dictated by events. He is to bear in mind, however, that the primary and only purpose of the expedition is to destroy the Xantippean Field.”

That ended the orders; but scrawled across the foot of the page was an almost illegible addendum: “Remember your last board meeting, Rip. And good luck!” The penciled initials were C. Renn, M. Ps. S. That would be Doc Renn.

I was so puzzled that my ears began to buzz. The government had apparently spent a huge pile of money in training us and outfitting the expedition. And yet our orders were as hazy as they could possibly be. And what was the idea of giving separate orders to each crew member? And such orders! “The procedure of the pro-tem commander must be dictated by events.” That’s what you’d call putting us on our own! It wasn’t like the crisp, detailed commands any navy man is used to. It was crazy.

Well, of course it was crazy, come to think of it. What else could you expect with this crew? I began to wish sincerely that the board had driven me nuts along with the rest of them.

I was at the chart table, coding up the hundred-hour log entry preparatory to slipping it into the printer, when I sensed someone behind me. The skipper, of course. He stayed there a long time, and I knew he was watching me.

I sat there until I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Come on in.” I said without moving. Nothing happened. I listened carefully until I could hear his careful breathing. It was short, swift. He was trying to breathe in a whisper. I began to be really edgy. I had a nasty suspicion that if I whirled I would be just in time to catch a bolt from a by-by gun.

Clenching my jaw till my teeth hurt, I rose slowly, and without looking around, went to the power-output telltales and looked at them. I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I’d never been this way before—always expecting attack from somewhere. I used to be a pretty nice guy. As a matter of fact, I used to be the nicest guy I knew. I didn’t feel that way any more.

Moving to the telltales took me another six or eight feet from the man at the door. Safer for both of us. And this way I had to turn around to get back to the table. I did. It wasn’t the skipper. It was the chemist, Harry Voight. We were old shipmates, and I knew him well.

“Hello, Harry. Why the dark companion act?”

He was tense. He was wearing a little mustache of perspiration on his upper lip. His peculiar eyes—the irises were as black as the pupils—were set so far back in his head that I couldn’t see them, for the alleyway light was directly over his head. His bald, bulging forehead threw two deep purple shadows, and out of them he watched me.

“Hi, Rip. Busy?”

“Not too busy. Put it in a chair.”

He came in and sat down. He turned as he passed me, backed into the pilot’s seat. I perched on the chart table. It looked casual, and kept my weight on one foot. If I had to move in any direction, including up, I was ready to.

After a time, he said, “What do you think of this, Rip?” His gesture took in the ship, Xantippe, the league, the board.

“I only work here.” I quoted. That was the motto of the navy. Our insignia is the league symbol superimposed on a flaming sun, under which is an ultraradio screen showing the words, “I only work here.” The famous phrase expresses the utmost in unquestioning, devoted duty.

Harry smiled a very sickly smile. If ever I saw a man with something eating him, it was Harry Voight. “S’matter?” I asked quietly. “Did somebody do you something?”

He looked furtively about him, edged closer. “Rip, I want to tell you something. Will you close the door?”

I started to refuse, and then reflected that regulations could stand a little relaxing in a coffin like this one. I went and pressed the panel, and it slid closed. “Make it snappy,” I said. “If the skipper comes up here and finds that door closed he’ll slap some wrists around here.”

As soon as the door closed, Harry visibly slumped. “this is the first time in two days I’ve felt—comfortable,” he said. He looked at me with sudden suspicion. “Rip—when we roomed together in Venus City, what color was that jacket I used to keep my ‘Naval Manual’ in?”

I frowned. I’d only seen the thing a couple of times— “Blue,” I said.

“That’s right.” He wiped his forehead. “You’re O.K.” He made a couple of false starts and then said, “Rip, will you keep everything I say strictly to yourself? Nobody can be trusted here—nobody!” I nodded. “Well,” he went on in a strained voice. “I know that this is a screwy trip. I know that the crew is—has been made—sort of—well, not normal—”

He said, with conviction, “The league has its own reason for sending us, and I don’t question them. But something has gone wrong. You think Xantippe is going to get us? Ha! Xantippe is getting us now!” He sat back triumphantly.

“You don’t say.”

“But I do! I know she’s countless thousands of light years away. But I don’t have to tell you of the power of Xantippe. For a gigantic power like that, a little project like what they’re doing to us is nothing. Any force that can throw out a field three quarters of a billion miles in diameter can play hell with us at a far greater distance.”

“Could be,” I said. “Just what are they doing?”

“They’re studying us,” he hissed. “They’re watching each of us, our every action, our every mental reflex. And one by one they are—taking us away! They’re got the Hartley twins, and Bort Brecht, and soon they’ll have me. I don’t know about the others, but their turns will come. They are taking away our personalities, and substituting their own. I tell you, those three men—and soon now, I with them—those men are not humans, but Xantippeans!”

“Now wait,” I said patiently. “Aren’t you going on guesswork. Nobody knows if Xantippe’s inhabited. And I doubt that this substitution you speak of can be done.”

“You don’t think so? For pity’s sake, Rip—for your own good, try to believe me! The Xantippean Field is a thought force, isn’t it? And listen—I know it if you don’t—this crew was picked for its hatred of Xantippe. Don’t you see why? The board expects that hatred to act as a mental ‘fender’—to partly ward off the field. They think there might be enough left of our minds when we’re inside the field to accomplish our objective. They’re wrong, Rip—wrong! The very existence of our communal hatred is the thing that has given us away. They have been ready for us for days now—and they are already doing their work aboard.”

He subsided, and I prodded him with gentle questions.

“How do you know the Xantippeans have taken away those three men?”

“Because I happened to overhear the Hartley twins talking in the messroom two days ago. They were talking about their orders. I know I should not have listened, but I was already suspicious.”

“They were talking about their orders? I understood that the orders were confidential.”

“They were. But you can’t expect the Hartleys to pay much attention to that. Anyway, Jo confided that a footnote on his orders had intimated that there was only one sane man aboard. Phil laughed that off. He said he knew he was sane, and he knew that Jo was sane. Now, I reason this way. Only a crazy man would question the league; a crazy man or an enemy. Now the Hartleys may be unbalanced, but they are still rational. They are still navy men. Therefore, they must be enemies, because navy men never question the league.”

I listened to that vague logic spoken in that intense, convincing voice, and I didn’t know what to think. “What about Bort Brecht—and yourself?”

“Bort! Ahh!” His lips curled. “I can sense an alien ego when I speak to him. It’s overwhelming. I hate Xantippe,” he said wildly, “but I hate Bort Brecht more! The only thing I could possibly hate more than Xantippe would be a Xantippean. That proves my point!” He spread his hands. “As for me—Rip, I’m going mad. I feel it. I see things—and when I do, I will be another of them. And then we will all be lost. For there is only one sane man aboard this ship, and that is me, and when I’m turned into a Xantippean, we will be doomed, and I want you to kill me!” He was half hysterical. I let him simmer down.

“And do I look crazy?” I asked. “If you are the only sane man—”

“Not crazy,” he said quickly. “A schizoid—but you’re perfectly rational. You must be, or you wouldn’t have remembered what color my book jacket was.”

I got up, reached out a hand to help him to his feet. He drew back. “Don’t touch me!” he screamed, and when I recoiled, he tried to smile. “I’m sorry, Rip, but I can’t be sure about anything. You may be a Xantippean by now, and touching me might . . . I’ll be going now . . . I—” He went out, his black, burning eyes half closed.

I stood at the door watching him weave down the alleyway. I could guess what was the matter. Paranoia—but bad! There was the characteristic persecution mania, the intensity of expression, the peculiar single-track logic—even delusions of grandeur. Hah! He thought he was the one mentally balanced man aboard!

I walked back to the chart table, thinking hard. Harry always had been pretty tight-lipped. He probably wouldn’t spread any panic aboard. But I’d better tip the captain off. I was wondering why the Hartley twins and Harry Voight had all been told that all hands but me were batty, when the skipper walked in.

“Rip,” he said without preamble. “Did you ever have a fight with Hoch McCory?”

“Good gosh, no!” I said. “I never saw him in my life until the day we sailed. I’ve heard of him, of course. Why?”

Parks looked at me oddly. “He just left my quarters. He had the most long-winded and detailed song and dance about how you were well known as an intersolar master saboteur. Gave names and dates. The names I know well. But the dates—well, I can alibi you for half of ’em. I didn’t tell him that. But—Lord! He almost had me convinced!”

“Another one!” I breathed. And then I told him about Harry Voight.

“I don’t imagine Doc Renn thought they would begin to break so soon,” said Parks when I had finished. “These boys were under laboratory conditions for three solid years, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” I said. “I don’t know a damn thing that’s going on around here and I’d better learn something before I go off my kilter, too.”

“Why, Ripley,” he said mockingly. “You’re overwrought!” Well, I was. Parks said, “I don’t know much more than you do, but that goofy story of Harry Voight’s has a couple of pretty shrewd guesses in it. For instance, I think he was right in assuming that the board had done something to the minds of . . . ah . . . some of the crew as armor against the field. Few men have approached it consciously—those who have were usually scared half to death. It’s well known that fear forms the easiest possible entrance for the thing feared—ask any good hypnotist. Hate is something different again. Hate is a psychological block against fear and the thing to be feared. And the kind of hate that these guys have for Xantippe and the field is something extra special. They’re mad, but they’re not afraid—and that’s no accident. When we do hit the field, it’s bound to have less effect on us than it had on the crews of poor devils who tried to attack it.”

“That sounds reasonable. Er . . . skipper, about this ‘one sane man’ business. What do you think of that?”

“More armor,” said Parks. “But armor against the man himself. Harry, for instance, was made a paranoiac, which is a very sensible kind of nut; but at the same time he was convinced that he alone was sane. If he thought his mind had been actually tampered with instead of just—tested, he’d get all upset about it and, like as not, undo half the Psy Board’s work.”

Some of that struck some frightening chords in my memory. “Cap’n—do you believe that there is one sane, normal man aboard?”

“I do. One.” He smiled slowly. “I know what you’re thinking. You’d give anything to compare your orders with mine, wouldn’t you?”

“I would. But I won’t do it. Confidential. I couldn’t let myself do it even if you agreed, because—” I paused.

“Well?”

“Because you’re an officer and I’m a gentleman.”

In my bunk at last, I gave over wishing that we’d get to the field and have it over with, and tried to do some constructive thinking. I tried to remember exactly what Doc Renn had said, and when I did, I was sorry I’d made the effort. “You are sane,” and “You have been subjected to psychic forces that are sufficient to drive a normal man quite mad” might easily be totally different things. I’d been cocky enough to assume that they meant the same thing. Well, face it. Was I crazy? I didn’t feel crazy. Neither did Harry Voight. He thought he was going crazy, but he was sure he hadn’t got there yet. And what was “crazy,” anyway? It was normal, on this ship, to hate Xantippe so much that you felt sick and sweated cold when you thought of it. Paranoia—persecution. Did I feel persecuted? Only by the thought of our duty toward Xantippe, and the persecution was Xantippe, not the duty. Did I have delusions of grandeur? Of course not; and yet—hadn’t I blandly assumed that Voight had such delusions because he thought he was the one sane man aboard?

What was the idea of that, anyway? Why had the board put one sane man aboard—if it had? Perhaps to be sure that one man reacted differently to the others at the field, so that he could command. Perhaps merely to make each man feel that he was sane, even though he wasn’t. My poor, tired brain gave it up and I slept.

We had two casualties before we reached the field. Harry Voight cut his throat in the washroom, and my gentle old buddy, Seabiscuit, crushed in the back of Hoch McCoy’s head. “He was an Insurrectionist spy,” he insisted mildly, time and again, while we were locking him up.

After that, we kept away from each other. I don’t think I spoke ten words to anyone outside of official business, from that day until we snapped into galactic stasis near Betelgeuse. I was sorry about Hoch, because he was a fine lad. But my sorrow was tempered by the memory of his visit to the captain. There had been a pretty fine chance of his doing that to me.

In normal space once more, we maneuvered our agile little craft into an orbit about the huge sun and threw out our detectors. These wouldn’t tell us much when the time came, for their range wasn’t much more than the radium of the field.

The mad planet swam up onto the plates and I stared at it as I buzzed for the skipper. Xantippe was a strangely dull planet, even this close to her star. She shone dead silver, like a moonlit corpse’s flesh. She was wrinkled and patched, and—perhaps it was an etheric disturbance—she seemed to pulsate slowly from pole to pole. She wasn’t quite round: more nearly an ovoid, with the smaller end toward Betelgeuse! She was between two and three times the size of Luna. Gazing at her, I thought of the thousands of men of my own service who had fallen prey to her, and of the fine ships of war that had plunged into the field and disappeared. Had they crashed? Had they been tucked into some weird warp of space? Were they captives of some strange and horrible race?

Xantippe had defied every type of attack so far. She swallowed up atomic mines and torpedoes with no appreciable effect. She was apparently impervious to any rayed vibration known to man; but she was matter, and should be easy meat for an infragun—if you could get an infragun close enough. The gun’s twin streams of highly charged particles, positrons on one side, mesatrons on the other, would destroy anything that happened to be where they converged. But an infragun has an effective range of less than five hundred miles. Heretofore, any ship which carried the weapon that close to Xantippe carried also a dead or mindless crew.

Captain Parks called the crew into the control room as soon as he arrived. No one spoke much: they didn’t need any more information after they had glanced at the viewplate which formed the forward wall of the chamber. Bort Brecht, the swarthy engineer, wanted to know how soon we’d engage the field.

“In about two hours,” said the captain glibly. I got a two-handed grip on myself to keep from yapping. He was a cold-blooded liar—we’d hit it in half an hour or less, the way I figured it. I guessed that he had his own reasons. Perhaps he thought it would be easier on the crew that way.

Parks leaned casually against the integrators and faced the crew. “Well, gentlemen,” he said as if he were banqueting on Earth, “we’ll soon find out what this is all about. I have instructions from the league to place certain information at your disposal.

“All hands are cautioned to obey the obvious commander once we’re inside the field. That commander may or may not be myself. That has been arranged for. Each man must keep in mind the objective—the destruction of the Xantippean Field. One of us will lead the others toward that objective. Should no one seem to be in command a pro-tem captain is to be elected.”

Brecht spoke up. “Cap’n, how do we know that this ‘commander’ that has been arranged for isn’t Harry Voight or Hoch McCoy?”

“We don’t know,” said Parks gravely. “But we will. We will.”

Twenty-three minutes after Xantippe showed up on the plates, we engaged her field.

All hands were still in the control room when we plunged in. I remember the sudden weakness of my limbs, and the way all five of the others slipped and slid down to the deck. I remember the Biscuit’s quaver, “I tell you it’s all a dirty Insurrectionist plot.” And then I was down on the deck, too.

Something was hurting me, but I knew exactly where I was. I was under Dr. Grenfell’s torture machine; it was tearing into my mind, chilling my brain. I could feel my brains, every last convolution of them. They were getting colder and colder, and bigger and bigger, and pretty soon now they would burst my skull and the laboratory and the building and chill the Earth. Inside my chest I was hot, and of course I knew why. I was Betelgeuse, mightiest of suns, and with my own warmth. I warmed half a galaxy. Soon I would destroy it, too, and that would be nice.

All the darkness in Great Space came to me.

Leave me alone. I don’t care what you want done. I just want to lie here and— But nobody wanted me to do anything. What’s all the hollering about, then? Oh. I wanted something done. There’s something that has to be done, so get up, get up, get—

“He is dead. Death is but a sleep and a forgetting, and he’s asleep, and he’s forgotten everything, so he must be dead!” It was Phil Hartley. He was down on his hunkers beside me, shrieking at the top of his voice, mouthing and pointing like an ape completely caught up in the violence of his argument. Which was odd, because he wasn’t arguing with anybody. The skipper was sitting silently in the pilot’s chair, tears streaming down his cheeks. Jo Hartley was dead or passed out on the deck. The Biscuit and Bort Brecht were sitting on the deck holding hands like children, starring entranced into the viewplate. It showed a quadrant of Xantippe, filing the screen. The planet’s surface did indeed pulsate, and it was a beautiful sight. I wanted to watch it drawing closer and closer, but there was something that had to be done first.

I sat up achingly. “Get me some water,” I muttered to Phil Hartley. He looked at me, shrieked, and went and hid under the chart table.

The vision of Xantippe caught and held me again, but I shook it off. It was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen and it promised me all I could ever want, but there was something I had to do first. Maybe someone could tell me. I shook the skipper’s shoulder.

“Go away,” he said. I shook him again. He made no response. Fury snapped into my brain. I cuffed him with my open hand, front and back, front and back. He leaped to his feet, screamed, “Leave me alone!” and slumped back into the chair. At the sound Bort Brecht lurched to his feet and came over to us. When he let go Seabiscuit’s hand, the Biscuit began to cry quietly.

“I’m giving the orders around here,” Bort said.

I was delighted. There had been something, a long time ago, about somebody giving orders. “I have to do something,” I said. “Do you know what it is?”

“Come with me.” He led the way, swaggering, to the screen. “Look,” he commanded, and then sat down beside Seabiscuit and lost himself in contemplation. Seabiscuit kept on crying.

“That’s not it,” I said doubtfully. “I think you gave me the wrong orders.”

“Wrong?” he bellowed. “Wrong? I am never wrong!” He got up, and before I knew what was coming, he hauled off and cracked three knuckles with my jawbone. I hit the deck with a crash and slid up against Jo Hartley. Jo didn’t move. He was alive, but he just didn’t seem to give a damn. I lay there for a long time before I could get up again. I wanted to kill Bort Brecht, but there was something I had to do first.

I went back to the captain and butted him out of the chair. He snarled at me and went and crouched by the bulkhead, tears still streaming down his cheeks. I slumped into the seat, my fingers wandering idly about the controls without touching them, my eyes desperately trying to avoid the glory of Xantippe.

It seemed to me that I was very near to the thing I was to do. My right hand touched the infragun activator switch, came away, went back to it, came away. I boldly threw the other switch; a network of crosshairs and a bright central circle appeared on the screen. This was it, I thought. Bort Brecht yelped like a kicked dog when the crosshairs appeared, but did not move. I activated the gun, and grasped the range lever in one hand and the elevation control in the other. A black-centered ball of flame hovered near the surface of the planet.

This was it! I laughed exultantly and pushed the range lever forward. The ball plunged into the dull-silver mystery, leaving a great blank crater. I pulled and pushed at the elevation control, knowing that my lovely little ball was burning and tearing its inexorable way about in the planet’s vitals. I drew it out to the surface, lashed it up and down and right and left, cut and slashed and tore.

Bort Brecht was crouched like an anthropoid, knees bent, knuckles on the deck, fury knotting his features, eyes fixed on the scene of destruction. Behind me, Phil Hartley was teetering on tiptoe, little cries of pain struggling out of his lips every time the fireball appeared. Bort spun and was beside me in one great leap. “What’s happening? Who’s doing that?”

“He is,” I said immediately, pointing at Jo Hartley. I knew that this was going to be tough on Jo, but I was doing the thing I had to do, and I knew Bort would try to stop me. Bort leaped on the prone figure, using teeth and nails and fists and feet; and Phil Hartley hesitated only a minute, torn between the vision of Xantippe and something that called to him from what seemed a long, long while ago. Then Jo cried out in agony, and Phil, a human prototype of my fireball, struck Bort amidships. Back and forth, fore and aft, the bloody battle raged, while Seabiscuit whimpered and the skipper, still sunk in his introspective trance, wept silent. And I cut and stabbed and ripped at Xantippe.

I took care now, and cut a long slash almost from pole to pole; and the edges opened away from the wound as if the planet had been wrapped in a paper sheath. Underneath it was an olive-drab color, shot with scarlet. I cut at this incision again and again, sinking my fireball in deeper at each slash. The weakened ovoid tended to press the edges together, but the irresistible ball sheared them away as it passed; and when it had cut nearly all the through, the whole structure fell in on itself horribly. I had a sudden feeling of lightness, and then unbearable agony. I remember stretching back and back over the chair in the throes of some tremendous attack from inside my body, and then I struck the deck with my head and shoulders, and I was all by myself again in the beautiful black.

There was a succession of lights that hurt, and soothing smells, and the sound of arcs and the sound of falling water. Some of them were weeks apart, some seconds. Sometimes I was conscious and could see people tiptoeing about. Once I thought I heard music.

But at last I awoke quietly, very weak to a hand on my shoulder. I looked up. It was Dr. Renn. He looked older.

“How do you feel, Rip?”

“Hungry.”

He laughed. “That’s splendid. Know where you are?”

I shook my head, marveling that it didn’t hurt me.

“Earth,” he said. “Psy hospital. You’ve been through the mill, son.”

“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.