II
Planet Shift
I stared at him uneasily. He was talking like an idiot. I knew that Jupiter itself would have to dwindle to a small disk before Callisto could become a pin point of light. When you take off from a little moon the glare of its primary magnifies its surface features. For about one hour Callisto would look like a black orchid dwindling in a blaze of light. Then it would whip away into emptiness to reappear as a glowing dot.
“Jupiter looks funny too!” Pete muttered. “Mighty funny! Like a big slice o’ yellow cheese with golden bands around it, spreadin’ out—”
That did it! I got up and walked to the viewpane, slapping my hands together explosively. I had to let off steam in some way. My steadiness surprised me. My eyelids felt a little heavy, but there was nothing wrong with my space legs.
When I started out I didn’t see the red gnat. But I saw something else, something that gave me a tremendous shock. What I saw was a great ringed planet swimming in a golden haze!
When I turned my face must have given Pete a jolt. He gulped so hard I was afraid he’d swallow his Adam’s apple and choke on the rind.
“What is it, Jim?” he asked huskily. “You look like you’d seen a ghost!”
I laughed without amusement. “I did! A ghost planet! And we’re not moving away from it! It’s getting larger!”
Pete stared. “Sure you feel okay, son?”
“Not too good!” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “Take another look!”
I gestured toward the viewpane. “Go on! See for yourself!”
Pete stood for a long time with his face pressed to the pane, his shoulders hunched. I thought he was never going to turn.
A crazy thought flashed through my mind. I’d seen men in a state of collapse on their feet, their faces blanched, unable to move or speak. Had Pete been shocked speechless?
I was sweating as he turned. His face was blanched, all right, but he could speak, and did!
“I’ve got to sit down, Jim!” he choked out.
He reeled to the bulkhead chronometer, sat down and started tugging at his chin. After a moment he whipped his hand from his face.
“You’re an educated man, Jim,” he said. “I’m not! If you tell me we’re headin’ straight for Saturn, I won’t call you a liar!”
“You won’t?”
“No, Jim. Say a guy brings you a watch. The hands go in the wrong direction, the tickin’s so loud it drives you nuts. ‘Buddy,’ he says, ‘if you want to know what time it isn’t, this watch will tell you.’
“Well, say you’ve got to know the time, say your life depends on it. What do you do, Jim? Lift him up by his seat and toss him out the door? Shucks, no! You listen while he talks. You ask him to take the watch apart and show you what makes it tick.”
“Fine!” I said. “So I’m the man with the watch! I put Saturn outside the viewpane just to torture you!”
He looked so miserable I felt sorry for him. “I didn’t mean it that way, Jim,” he apologized. “But I’m plumb scared! Somethin’s happenin’ to space! Somethin’ ghastly awful! You must have some idea what’s causin’ it!”
“Don’t kid yourself!” I told him. “A wild guess isn’t an idea.”
“Let me be the judge o’ that, son!”
“Well—all right. Maybe we’re seeing Saturn as a magnified image—through some kind of magnifying space drift. A big, floating lens in space, made up of refractive particles spread out in a cloud. A lens with more magnifying power than the five-hundred inch! It isn’t as haywire as it sounds, if that’s any comfort to you!”
“But no pilot’s ever seen anything like that, Jim!” Pete protested, with unanswerable logic.
He tapped his brow. “It could be in here, Jim! That’s what I’m afraid of! A sickness of the mind—”
“Don’t start that!” I warned, striking my knee with my fist. “Don’t even think it!”
My voice was getting out of control. I was yelling at him, and there was no reason for it.
He had every right to his opinion.
“What are we goin’ to do, Jim?”
“Check up first!” I snapped. “If I have to use every instrument on the ship—”
I stopped. The door into the pilot room had opened and closed, and a clumping figure was coming toward us across the deck.
I heard Pete suck in his breath. I couldn’t seem to draw a deep breath. There was a physical quality of eeriness in the sight which took me by the throat.
The figure was wearing a light spacesuit, vacuum-sealed at the neck. A transparent headpiece bulged out above the flexible garment, a great glistening globe encasing the head of the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
Her hair was piled in a tumbled mass of gold on her head and there was a delicate flush on her skin, visible through the glowing sphere. She was staring at me without seeming to see me, her cheeks shadowed by long, convex lashes.
Some women mature into loveliness; others have it thrust upon them. I didn’t tell myself that straight off. I was too stunned to make up pretty speeches. But later I realized that her hair, eyes, and complexion were as near perfect as they could be without looking artificial.
Her suit was cumbersome, and it weighed her down. But there was something weird, spine-chilling about the way she moved. She walked with a smooth flow of motion, almost as if she were skating across the deck.
I was a little afraid of what Pete might do. He was shaking with excitement, and I could see that he was keyed up to a dangerous pitch. Doubting his own sanity and mine to boot!
But I wasn’t going to be stampeded into fear! I’d been under a tremendous strain, sure. But I knew a flesh-and-blood woman when I saw one! The girl was real! The pulse beating in her forehead was real and so were her eyes and hair! We hadn’t made even a cursory search of the ship. There were plenty of dark little corners where she could have concealed herself.
Suddenly I saw that she’d glided past Pete and was facing away from us, her hands extended toward the control board. A little to the left of the board there was a dull flickering on the bulkhead.
For an instant I mistook the weird glimmer for a shadow cast by her swaying shoulders. I thought she was just reaching for the board to steady herself.
Then I saw her hands moving on the board and knew that a gravity panel was swinging open on the void! I leapt toward her with a warning cry.
If she heard me she gave no sign. You can hear a shout through a thin helmet, but she didn’t even turn. She just darted sideways and then forward—straight through the panel into the utter black emptiness of space! A flash of light—and she was gone!
The panel closed so soundlessly you could have heard a pin drop.
I had trouble with my breath again. For an instant my throat had an iron brace around it. Then I remembered that she hadn’t gone out unprotected into the void. Her suit would keep the cold out, and the magnetic suction disks on her wrists and knees would enable her to cling to the hull, to crawl along it. But if she’d gone out to do a repair job on the hull, she had the kind of courage you read about in the Admiralty Reports.
If I had it, it was glazed over with a thick coating of ice. I stood braced against the bulkhead, the old Adam in me chanting a hymn to life, a hymn to the Sun, and feeling glad I wasn’t in her shoes.
What a way for a guy to feel!
Then something happened to me. I saw her face again, deep in my mind, and it seemed to be pleading with me. It wasn’t just a pleading. There was music and wonder in it!
I could hear the pound of surf on a golden beach, and the sun was warming the sea and the air, and she was in my arms and I was kissing her.
Then it was night and the palms were bending lower over us, and the moonlight was so bright I could hardly see the web of radiance around her head. But I could hear the rise and fall of paddles, and someone singing far off over the water. We were running down the beach toward the pounding surf. Water was glistening on her tanned arms and I could hear her laughter.
Pete had leapt to his feet. He was staring at me, sweat standing out on his forehead in great, shining beads.
“What did I tell you, son?” he groaned. “A sickness of the mind—”
His voice thickened, broke.
The terror in his stare made me realize how close to the brink I was. His refusal to believe the evidence of his eyes was an attempt at rationalization, but it wasn’t a good attempt.
He was assuming the worst, taking his own madness for granted.
I grabbed him by both shoulders. “You’re as sane as I am!” I yelled, shaking him. “That girl was here when we took over! A stowaway! What’s so crazy about that?”
Pete’s throat moved as he swallowed. “Let go of me, Jim! Believe what you want! I’m going crazy—and tryin’ to explain it won’t stop it!”
“Common sense will stop it! Did you notice that vacuum suit she was wearing? It’s as ancient as the ship! It must have come out of the ship’s locker!”
Pete stared at me until I lost my head. “She’s out on the hull alone! You hear? Alone, in a suit that won’t give her much protection! If her irons slip she’ll be done for! She’s either stark staring mad or—”
My thoughts came so fast I had to stop. But my mind raced on. Was she actually mad? Or had she crawled out of hiding to find herself in a ship that was fast becoming a droning death trap?
A woman hiding in the dark, with her senses abnormally alert, would be quick to get the awful feel of a ship about to fly asunder. She wouldn’t have to guess. She’d know!
A girl pilot? Well, why not? There were plenty of girl pilots working their fingers to the bone to earn passage money in Callisto City. Stowing away would be a shortcut to freedom and the green hills of Earth. You couldn’t blame a girl for hating the dust and roar of an atomic power plant, or the drudgery of a mining job.
I could picture her succumbing to blind panic, ripping a suit down from the locker, and crawling out into the void to tighten the gravity bolts on the naked hull with a magneto-wrench.
“Jeebies always try to kill themselves!” Pete croaked. “You get to pitying them! Your head swells and you get all choked up with pity! And that’s when you know you’ve blown your top!”
I answered that with a voice that rang hard. “All right, have it your own way! She’s a jeebie! But I’m not going to stand here pitying her! I’m going to help her!”
I never quite knew how I reached the locker, with imaginary eyes glittering at me from every corner of the ship. Pete’s wild talk hadn’t really shaken me. All loose talk about the mind is dangerous, of course. But I wasn’t scared of anything I couldn’t see.
The idea of a haunted ship seemed silly to me. Almost laughable. But I had to admit the ship had the feel of occupancy about it. I half expected that a second helmeted figure would pop out of the shadows before I could go to the aid of the first.
My palms were sweating as I struggled into a spacesuit that hadn’t been occupied for at least a century. There were five suits hanging in the locker, and I picked the biggest one. It was a little too small for me, but I couldn’t complain much on that score. It kinked a little, then drew tight over the shoulders, but nothing ripped when I moved.
I must have looked grotesque in that old, stiff, freakish garment, all bulges and creases. A big flaring dome over my head, feet like metal pancakes clattering on the deck.
But I wasn’t concerned with my appearance, just my oxygen intake.
Back by the gravity panel, Pete tried desperately to stop me. His bony hands went out, plucked at my wrists. I couldn’t hear him babbling outside the helmet. But I could see his shining eyes and moving lips. His eyes were tortured, pleading.
He might as well have been pleading with a man a hundred miles away—or a century dead!
I was deaf to reason. I was feeling merely a blind instinct to help a woman who had taken on a man’s job.
Pete’s eyes followed me as I went clumping toward the control board, and I felt a sudden tug of pity for him. If I never came back, he’d miss me a lot. Good old Pete! To make him feel better I flashed him a smile and waved him back.
“Sit down and relax, old-timer!” I said. “I’m just going out for a little breath of fresh air!”
It was just as well he couldn’t hear me. He was real touchy about space. You had to treat it with respect. The lads who sailed the seas of Terra before Pete started reaching for the stars with his little pink hands had what it takes, and their lingo is the spaceman’s lingo still. But to Pete spacemen were a notch higher in every respect. Nothing riled him more than loose talk about reading the weather by the glass or taking a squint at the North Star. Or going out for a breather on deck!
I thought of all that as I went out. Oh, Pete was a special character if ever there was one.