Project Pope

Twenty-six

Again, Decker relived the moment. For years he had not thought of it, but now, ever since he had gone back to the boat, he had thought of it often, running the filmstrip of memory through again, with the old and faded recollection becoming the sharper with each rerunning.

He reached out and touched the metal box that stood upon the desk, the box he'd brought back from the lifeboat. It would all be there, he thought, in the records that the ship had made. But he flinched away from opening it and getting at the records. Perhaps, he told himself, he should have left them in the boat, where they had rested for twelve years, virtually forgotten.

Why was it, he wondered, that he hesitated to listen to the records? Was it that he feared the terror would be there? Could the ship have recorded the terror? Could it still lie there, as fresh and raw as it had been that day so many years before? He crinkled up his face in an effort at concentration. He had known that ship, had sailed it for years, had known every twist and turn of it, had loved it, been proud of it, talked to it in the lonely hours in the depths of space. At times, or so it seemed, the ship had talked back to him.

There was about it only one thing of which he had not been certain, and that was the true capabilities of the recordings that it made. That they had been detailed and clear, that they had missed nothing of significance, of that he was very certain. They recorded locations and distances, pegged coordinates within a small fraction of their value, pinpointed temperatures, pressures, chemical components, gravitational values, sniffed out life if life was present, sought out non-apparent dangers. But emotions — could they peg emotions? Could they have put on record that overwhelming terror that had driven his tough and seasoned crew in a mad frenzy for the lifeboats?

He sat at the desk, his fingers still touching the metal of the box, and closed his eyes the better to remember, seeking out, for the tenth time or more in the last few days, that one elusive thing that had escaped his memory.

They had been heading toward the deeper recesses of the Coonskin system when the warp had seized them. Strange thing, he thought — he'd always considered it to be a warp, that storied, unexplained rift in the space-time continuum that was little more than legend, a rift that had hurled the ship into another time-and/or space. There were rich, tall tales told of such happenings in every bar of every frontier planet, but the fact of their telling by the ones who told them, swearing solemnly and often to the veracity of the tales, did little to confirm the existence of the warps, or even the most remote possibility of them.

But warp or not, something violent had happened to the ship. Seemingly, as was always the case in FTL flight, the ship had been hanging in black nothingness, with no semblance of motion, when it had staggered, lurching and careening through whatever limbo of foreverness in which it had been situated. Decker remembered that he had been standing alone before one of the forward vision ports, staring out into the featureless emptiness outside the ship, fascinated, as he always had been, by the utter lack of any aspect that might be used to characterize it. It was black and it was empty and that was all it was. The blackness, however, failed in being actually black; it was black because there was nothing there, and empty not with any sense of deprivation, but by the fact also of there being nothing there, not an emptiness achieved by taking away what had been there, but empty because there never had been anything — and, more than likely, never would be anything. Many times he had wondered what it was that attracted him to this desolate and barren blankness and never, in all his wondering, had he ever arrived at any hint of its attraction for him.

Under his feet, the deck had heaved and thrown him sprawling. He had hit the deck and skidded, his direction changing as the ship yawed and tumbled. He had sought to stabilize himself, had clutched lit stationary objects, missing some, his fingers sliding off those few that he could grasp. He had banged against something solid and bounced off it. And, suddenly, he had hit his head a glancing blow on some hard and solid object and the world was filled with shooting stars.

He may have been knocked out for a time, of that he never had been sure. He had thought back on it many times and never could be sure.

The next thing he recalled was trying to pull himself erect, trying to climb one of the pilot chairs set before the navigation panels. His head buzzed and there was far-off screaming — the full-throated screams of frightened men, the raw, uninhibited howling of men so terrorized that they had lost control.

The damn fools, he had thought — what is the matter with them? But even as he wondered it, he knew what was the matter with them. The terror struck him straight between the eyes. It filled the ship to a point of suffocation and it hammered at him as if it were physical rather than emotional. Somewhere, the words booming but muffled by the terror, a great voice was shouting, but he could not make out the words.

The ship no longer bucked and heaved. He clung to the chair to keep himself from falling. When he tried to stand, his legs buckled under him. He glanced at the vision ports and saw that the black emptiness was gone; the ship was back in normal space.

The terror came in waves, buffeting him, striking him as an opponent might strike him with knotted fists. His stomach churned. Still clinging to the chair, he bent over, retching, trying to vomit but unable to.

Sheer terror. Nothing visible to indicate where the terror might be coming from; nothing to show why it should be visited upon him. Pure essence of terror without reason and all the time that background, booming voice shouting at him — at him personally, not at someone else or others, but centered on him personally. Intermingled with the booming voice, between the cracks of the booming voice, he could still hear the far and increasingly farther off howling of the crew, fleeing the terror, leaving him behind. He heard a thud and then another thud and knew that the thuds were the sounds of lifeboats launching.

By now he was on his feet and his legs seemed more sturdy under him. He put a hand to his head and felt the hank of sopping hair pasted against his skull. His hand came back red and dripping. He pushed away from the chair, aiming himself at the nearest vision port. Reeling across the deck, he reached the hull and clutched at it with his fingers, his face almost touching the hard crystal of the port.

Beneath the ship lay a planetary surface and it was far too close. Roads, thin from the distance that he viewed them, converged like the spokes of a wheel upon a central hub that lay just ahead of him. The ship, he knew, was in a tight orbit and closing fast. It was only a few minutes, more than likely, from crashing. Had it not been for the waves of terror that still came crashing in upon him, he would have heard, he knew, the thin, shrill whistle of the craft cutting into atmosphere.

His body was trying to shrivel, to sink in upon itself, drawing in and withering as a fallen apple, lying in the grass, would wither through a winter. He clutched tighter at the metal hull, although there was nothing he could clutch, but nevertheless he continued, insanely trying to sink his fingers into the very metal. Staring down and ahead, he saw more clearly now the hub upon which the roads converged. The hub was a height, a pyramid, an upthrust of rock that soared above the flatness of the surrounding countryside. The roads, he saw, did not terminate at the base of the great rock upthrust, but climbed the slope, arrowing upward toward the center of the hub.

For an instant only he saw the center of the hub, a sudden upheaval of spearlike structures that seemed to be reaching up as if to grasp him and impale him. And as he saw the center of the hub, he knew instinctively the source of the terror that was beating in upon him. With a cry wrenched from his throat, he reeled back from the port and for an instant stood cringing, undecided. Then years of training spoke to him subconsciously and he wheeled about to rush to the instrument panel. His hand reached out to seize the flight recorder. He jerked it free and, tucking it underneath his arm, turned and ran.

He had heard only two thuds, he remembered, and if that was correct, there was still a lifeboat left. Sweat broke out and ran down his body at the thought that he might have missed a thud and all the boats were gone.

His memory had not played him false. There had been only two thuds. The third boat was still in place.