The Star Virus

VIII

In the next few days Rodrone and Clave had no choice but to fraternize with the crew; their boisterous, nearly violent ways precluded reclusiveness.

There was a weirdness about them that Rodrone couldn’t place at first. There was Jermy, completely without humor, methodical, and with the intentness of a pervert. There was Jublow, an ungainly man with a brick red bull neck and a little-boy enthusiasm for the roughneck entertainments they all indulged in. And so on to unsmiling, melancholiac Krat, Pim, coarse and caustic, and others, about ten in all. They had the unity of a gang, but there was the same seedy, unhealthy aura about them all. Their eyes never really seemed to live, only to peer.

The only man who seemed to be in a brighter state of health was Feeldonet, the beefy man who had helped Rodrone at the portal, and apparently he was new.

Captain Shone ruled over them all like a well-meaning bully. He rarely joined in their more frenetic activities, such as the frenzied dancing and the rapid-fire target practices. Usually he sat back and watched, a bottle of foment leaning against one shoulder, smiling genially.

On the third day the crewmen raided Rodrone’s own quarters and commandeered the lens and carried it up to the control gallery. He flushed angrily at first, but they were unruly and in an advanced state of intoxication, and Shone gave no sign that he intended to control them. Every one on board was in the party except Clave, who had gone off by himself to stargaze in one of the weapons blisters.

The lens slammed to the floor as the men released their burden. There was a scuffle as they all jockeyed for good vantage points around it, then suddenly Pim seemed to assume command.

“Let’s see some pretty pictures,” he said.

They fell momentarily silent and gawped open-mouthed. To be honest with himself, Rodrone couldn’t blame them for not keeping their hands off it. In this frigid ship anything new was an attraction and the lens was certainly a stunner.

Pim squatted and pressed his nose flat against the surface of the lens. Then he stood up and tried to mark the glossy surface with a knife. “I want to see some space battles!”

“Yeah!” It was an enthusiastic chorus.

“There’s no control over it,” Rodrone informed them sourly. “The scenes are all random.”

“Aw.” Pim screwed up his face. “You’d think—here y’are then, what’s this comin’ up? Eh, it looks good!”

Rodron shouldered the others aside to look. Pim was right. From the center, a region of blackness was spreading towards the periphery. In it, ships appeared, rectilinear rods almost as black as space itself but shiny. Partitions continually slid open and shut on the long rods. The ships were fighting one another, directing energy and missiles through the openings and glinting inwardly with the urgency of contention.

It was as compelling and alien a sight as the lens had ever produced.

“Look!” mooed Jublow. “There’s another one!”

On the opposite side of the lens, wedge-shaped vessels stood out against a brilliant globular star cluster. They seemed to be fighting over possession of a nearby planet, and were warding one another off by creating fields of faint blue nimbus. Rodrone could almost hear them humming and crackling.

“How did you do that?” he demanded sharply.

“Do what?”

“How did you control the visions?”

“Who says I did?”

“I’ve never been able to get the pictures I wanted from it.” He did not mention the second reason for the unlikelihood of such scenes, namely the paucity of space-traveling races in the galaxy.

Pim cackled. “You ought to come down with us and play our little game, mate, and you’ll find out what wishing for things can do. I swear I’ve held that pile down by sheer damned willpower more than once!”

He looked around him for approbation, receiving it in an applause of chuckles and sniggers.

Captain Shone laughed out loud. “You’re surprised too often, old pal,” he remonstrated to Rodrone. “You want to be more flexible. If old John Theory was here, now, nothing would faze him.” He took a swig and spluttered. “There was a mind for you.”

Rodrone swung around, his puzzlement forgotten in the face of a fresh surprise. Suspicion flowered into certainty almost as soon as it was born.

“You knew him!”

“Of course I did.”

So that was it. The weirdness of the crew was totally explicable now. Shone had been personally acquainted with Clave’s distant ancestor, a man whose very family name had changed because of his scientific contributions, and who had lived two hundred years before. With that one datum, everything clicked into place.

Now he knew what sort of a ship he had bought passage on. These were men who would take cargoes on the long hauls across hundreds of light-years, where the time-dilation effect ensured that they could never return to the generation from which they departed. They were the most abandoned of men. They were called deadliners, because their utter removal from the warmth of human society gave them a close affinity with death. They no longer had the ordinary reasons that made a man want to stay alive; they had nothing but their existence in this mausoleum of a freighter.

It was not long before the deadliners grew tired of the lens and wandered off together, leaving Shone asleep at the control desk.

Rodrone sat moodily for a few minutes, then felt restless. The atmosphere of the deadliner ship made him more agitated than usual. He got up and explored sternwards.

The Stator was in complete silence. The galleries echoed his footsteps and the walls felt rusty to his touch. Near to where he believed the propulsion unit and power plant to be, he saw a yellow light and heard the murmur of voices.

The crew of the Stator were sitting on the floor of a small room, playing cards. One wall of the room was covered with the control mechanisms of a nuclear reactor of some antiquity, to judge by its design. The attitude of the deadliners was one of intense concentration. Rodrone had never seen them so quiet.

Pim laid down a card on the pack and moved a counter forward on a board by his side. “Check,” he said.

Someone got up and pulled a handle on the wall. Rodrone watched incredulously. He knew what the deadliner was doing: he was withdrawing one of the damper rods.

Jermy looked up as he entered. “You come to join us?”

“What’s the game?”

“Brag. Half skill, half chance.”

Rodrone nodded to the wall. “And what about the reactor? It’s a pretty dangerous thing to include in a game of cards. What sort is it?”

“It’s a fast one. It becomes a bomb without the moderators.”

He swallowed. There was no need to ask how that figured.

Pim noticed his discomfort. “Whassamatter? We were playing when you came aboard.”

“What? You mean you played this mad game aground on Stundaker?”

“Sure.”

“But you might have taken half the spaceground with you!”

“The whole of it, mate. This is a fair old reactor we’ve got here. Well, shall I deal you a hand?”

Rodrone sat down as Jublow shifted over to make room. “Yeah, what the hell…”

As the game progressed, Rodrone picked up the details. It was a game in which there were no gains, only one ultimate loss. As the scores mounted, so the reactor’s moderating rods were withdrawn; the idea was to win by beating all other opponents while the scores were still low enough to come out alive, and that needed both skill and luck.

The deadliners called the game Brag, but a better name would have been Dare. In a showdown, the scores of all the hands were added, and the leading player who forced the showdown could rarely be sure of what the others held.

It was rather like a game of pistol roulette Rodrone had once seen, where each player took a chance that the heat charge he fired at his head was not the one in five that was actually live. But in this game, no one put down any money. The stakes were purely negative… and why shouldn’t they be, Rodrone thought. In a sense, these men were dead already.

There was one final grisly touch of murder, to prevent the game from becoming spurious. A player in a winning position who lost his nerve and tried to back out paid a forfeit, by being locked in the cavity behind the reactor’s shielding. Rodrone did not know if there were currently any bodies there.

He played cautiously and well, but the others were experts. One by one the rods moved out, occasionally one being pushed back in as the score momentarily dropped. Suddenly he was aware of someone standing in the entrance. Clave had also been attracted by the light. He stepped in, taking in the scene with one glance around. “Brag, eh? I’m good at it.”

There was hardly a word spoken as he took a place and accepted a hand. Did the youngster realize what he had walked in on? Rodrone started to voice a warning, but the heavy dead ethic of the deadliners fell down on him like a stifling blanket, damming the impulse.

To judge by the quick and easy way in which Clave ran up a good score, he had not given a thought to what the stakes were. The deadliners became very tense. Rodrone could almost see them thinking “this is it.”

After about half an hour, however, the significance of the manipulations of the reactor controls gradually seeped in on Clave. He studied his hand, still sinister of aspect and smiling, but, Rodrone knew, very thoughtful.

This must be it, Rodrone told himself. Apart from the fact that Clave ran up a high score without knowing what he was doing, they don’t scale down to account for there being two extra players.

“Yeah,” said Clave, slightly breathless-sounding. “Well, this has gone far enough.” He laid down his cards.

“You can’t do that, mister,” Krat, the melancholiac, informed dourly.

“But dammit—” Clave glanced at the radiation meter, which was glowing brightly. “Just look at it already.”

“It’s hot in there,” Jermy agreed. Briefly he explained about the forfeit.

Clave gave Rodrone a wild look. “Are you in on this?”

“It’s the rules, Clave!” Rodrone said in a tortured voice. Clave jumped up. “You’re not putting me in there—” In an instant the others were on him. Clave’s hair swung around his shoulders as they lifted him off his feet. Rodrone leaped forward to put a stop to it, but he was cuffed back.

Then it was done. A thick section of wall swung open. A narrow passage opened up behind it, and into this Clave was stuffed, between the two reactor casings. The heavy door slammed shut.

Rodrone was in a state of stunned horror. The deadliners stood around silently, shifty-faced and avoiding one another’s glances.

Then they suddenly broke out into one of their spontaneous dancing sessions, thumping the floor with enthusiastic exertions. From somewhere musical intruments were produced, and three of their number filled the room with surprisingly expert swing music from a now forgotten era. Energetically, they all danced. Jublow danced, his huge hunched shoulders twisting back and forth and his red neck straining. Even Jermy joined in, snakelike, his back crouched and his face intent and deadpan. All their faces seemed corpselike, out of place with the convulsions of their bodies.

Rodrone left, sickened, and made his way back to the control gallery. Shone had woken up, and was staring blearily into nothing.

Limply Rodrone sat down. “That death-wish gang of yours has just killed Clave,” he said dully.

“Killed him? How?”

Rodrone explained.

Shone looked regretful. “He was a likable lad.”

The epitaph struck Rodrone forcibly. He grunted in disgust. “Have you nothing to say for those murdering bully-boys of yours?”

“Eh? Hah! So you’re complaining.” Shone stuck his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the picture cavity behind him, with its closely-drawn designs of suns. “Remember what you said? You said you liked it like this. Lawlessness. Disorder! Well, this is it!” He peered at Rodrone, leaning forward. “The way things are, anything can happen in this universe. Some good things, some bad, some pretty ghastly. But who are you to set a limit on what should happen in the whole cosmos?”

Rodrone stared sullenly at him for a long moment. He slumped. Then he grunted again, this time with a hint of grudging humor. “Tell me,” he said, “why do you seem a bit more human than the rest—and yet you still stick with them?”

For answer, Shone flicked a switch. On a small vision plate something appeared.

This time it was not the artificially condensed image that glowed behind him. It was a vaster view, more like what the naked eye would see.

“Just look at that.”

Rodrone saw—suns. Billions of suns, congregated in piling clouds and clusters, space edging black between them.

“That’s excuse enough for anything,” Shone said.

“Then we’re brothers under the skin,” Rodrone told him, laughing shortly.

Shone flicked off the vision plate. “Business acquaintances, anyway. The Streall are on to us. I’ve detected them coming up fast—three or four ships. I think we’d better slip out of the way.”

He climbed down from the throne and walked unsteadily to one end of the desk, where he made an adjustment. Then he came back and began to work with the controls.

After a minute or two concern showed on his face. “Something’s wrong.”

He continued working for about another minute, and spoke into a communicator.

“Feeldonet!” he bellowed.

A voice answered. “Yep?”

“The drive’s acting up. It doesn’t work! Fix it will you?”

“Right.”

Shone glanced at Rodrone. “It’ll mean a pitched battle if they catch up with us, but we mount some pretty powerful weapons.”

Half an hour later Feeldonet came up to the control gallery. He was embarrassed. Somewhat diffidently, he explained how fluctuations in the power supply—caused by tampering with the reactor—had disturbed the drive and thrown it out of action. Then he described his efforts to put it right, ending apologetically with a story of failure.

Then he admitted that he knew nothing about the drive in question.

Rodrone was amazed. “Is this your ship’s engineer?” he said to the captain.

Shone sighed. “I took him on a couple of stops back. He seemed good enough, and he certainly put up a good case for himself. You gulled me!” he said accusingly to Feeldonet.

Feeldonet shifted his feet. “All right, it’s true I’d never heard of this system before, but I’m a good technician and I thought there wasn’t anything I couldn’t get the hang of. I won’t be so cocksure again.”

Rodrone questioned him, intrigued. He had traveled under dozens of different space propulsion systems: numberous sophistications of the reaction-mass principle, “space-compression,” and even on the new drover engines. But of them all, the method used by the Stator was the most bizarre. The mathematics that described it made no reference to motion at all—Feeldonet did not think that they made any reference even to the ship. Consideration was given to the surrounding matter in space, viewed from various separated points. Somehow the ship was hauled from one to another of these points, by means of a change of observer, as it were.

It was as close to a practical application of sheer metaphysics as Rodrone was ever likely to see.

“Now you know why the ship was cheap,” the engineer told Shone. “Only three of these units were ever built. Just after you gave me the job, a fellow told me that was because there were only ever three technicians who understood it.”

Shone looked at a suddenly winking screen before him.

“And you thought you could make it four, eh? Well, keep trying. We’ve got trouble on our hands.”

Rodrone peered over his shoulder. On the screen, three long, angular Streall ships flashed into existence.

From the deadliners’ point of view, the Streall had not necessarily come with hostile intentions. But Rodrone urged that they be fought off and the deadliners were quick and eager.

Rodrone retired to one end of the gallery during the battle. An unspeakable weariness had come over him, more profound than anything he had felt before. The death of Clave had shaken him. His failure to act in his defense also bothered him, and he realized that having fallen in with the deadliners, he had taken up their ways with frightening readiness, as if hypnotized.

Men became deadliners because they had been “squeezed out” of normal life because of personality defects or an irremediable need to fail. The long-haul ships swept up a human detritus of psychotics, would-be suicides, and people who were unable for one reason or another to form proper relationships with healthy human beings. They were the desperadoes of the psyche, inviting death, defying life to have any meaning. What stroke of fate was it that had thrown Rodrone in their midst?

Captain Shone stooped intently over the desk console. The sounds of searing shots from the heavy weapons came from the distant parts of the ship. Then there was a shuddering crash as the Streall returned the fire.

The Stator shook and buckled. Captain Shone hung on to his quivering desk with one hand, manipulating controls with the other and giving orders through the intercom at the same time. There came another, heavier crash that caused the control gallery to keel over and almost toppled Shone from his seat. Rodrone glanced up, and even from this distance he knew that Shone was sweating.

The frequency of the Stator’s firing increased. The flat hoarse sounds of the big guns echoed almost desperately through the metal and air of the ship.

Rodrone began to feel concern. He climbed to his feet, ventured forward. “How’s it going?” he called uncertainly.

The floor vibrated under him as the Streall scored another hit. The magnificent navigation picture behind Shone winked suddenly out.

It was followed by all the lights in the control room, including those on the desk console.

Captain Shone shouted and cursed in the darkness. The noises of battle continued. Rodrone decided to take no further interest until the outcome was known, and he dropped his head and let his mind drift to other thoughts.

He was still in that revery twenty minutes later when the lights came on again. Shone was grinning down at him.

“Come out of your sulk. We’ve won. They were patrol craft—there must be a Streall system nearby. What’s more, we’ve got a prisoner.”

He learned that Jermy, rigging a spaceraft from an emergency rocket motor, had crossed over to the wreck of one of the alien vessels and had brought back a survivor. Rodrone stepped forward as they herded it into the control gallery.

It seemed to be a specimen in good condition. The long armadillo-like body and broad, pointed snout were a healthy blue color. Natural skirts of hide reached from the sides to the ground so that it seemed to glide along, but Rodrone knew that beneath them were six legs and a pair of arms which folded underneath the chest.

Its sapphire eyes regarded Rodrone, then swung to the lens which still lay on the floor of the control gallery.

“So it is true. You have it.”

Rodrone nodded.

“And what do you intend to do with it?”

He had no qualms about revealing his purpose. “I intend to understand it.”

“How?”

“There must be a way.”

An explosive sound came from the Streall, like a cat’s sneeze. “Ridiculous. That is only for the Streall.”

“Do you understand it?” Rodrone probed.

“I? Of course not. I am only an engineer, a drive engineer on a patrol ship. The lens is completely understood only by those who live on the Contemplation Worlds.”

At this Rodrone became agitated. It had already occurred to him that the secrets of the lens might be beyond the ingenuity of the human intellect to uncover. If that were so, then any risk would be worthwhile.

“Where are these Contemplation Worlds?”

“That is unimportant to you. Your only sane action is to deliver the lens to its rightful possessors, the Streall.”

“Not until I understand what its uses are,” Rodrone suggested speculatively. “Perhaps then I would be persuaded to give it up.”

The Streall sank to the floor in a resting position, like a Sphinx, its skirts spreading around it. “If that is all you want, then go to a Contemplation World. The philosopher there can perhaps explain it to you. Afterwards, you will give it up.”

“I said I might.”

“There will be no choice. Ships will be arriving soon. They will follow you to the Contemplation World. But if you do not go, you will never achieve your ambition.”

Rodrone laughed at how neatly the Streall had led him into a dilemma.

“This is crazy,” Shone said. “We’re not going anywhere. We’re stranded!”

“We have a faulty space drive,” Rodrone told their prisoner. “We don’t know how to repair it. Perhaps you would have better luck. If you can put it in order, we will proceed to the Contemplation World, as you suggest. That is, if Captain Shone agrees.”

Shone shrugged characteristically. “We’re walking right into a trap, but okay.”

The Streall rose. “It is better for the lens to be on a Streall world than to be lost in space. Show me your drive.”