Stranger Station, Page 3

  The blurred reflections in the metal trim of the dining room gave him no answers—only pale faceless smears of gray. Wesson felt light-headed and very weak, as if he had just ended a bout of fever. He fumbled over his ribs and shoulder bones. He was thin.

  He sat in front of the autochef for a few minutes more, but no food came out. Evidently Aunt Jane did not think he was ready for it, and perhaps she was right. Worse for them than for us, he thought dizzily. That’s why the Station’s so far out, why radio silence, and only one man aboard. They couldn’t stand it at all, otherwise … Suddenly he could think of nothing but sleep—the bottomless pit, layer after layer of smothering velvet, numbing and soft… His leg muscles quivered and twitched when he tried to walk, but he managed to get to the bedroom and fall on the mattress. The resilient block seemed to dissolve under him. His bones were melting.

  He woke with a clear head, very weak, thinking cold and clear: When two alien cultures meet, the stronger must transform the weaker with love or hate. “Wesson’s Law,” he said aloud. He looked automatically for pencil and paper, but there was none, and he realized he would have to tell Aunt Jane, and let her remember it.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Never mind, remember it anyway. You’re good at that, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Paul.”

  “All right—I want some breakfast.”

  He thought about Aunt Jane, so nearly human, sitting up here in her metal prison, leading one man after another through the torments of hell—nursemaid, protector, torturer. They must have known that something would have to give… But the alphas were comparatively new; nobody understood them very well. Perhaps they really thought that an absolute prohibition could never be broken.

  … the stronger must transform the weaker…

  I’m the stronger, he thought. And that’s the way it’s going to be. He stopped at the console, and the screen was blank. He said angrily, “Aunt Jane!” And with a guilty start, the screen flickered into life.

  Up there, the alien had rolled again in his pain. Now the great clustered eyes were staring directly into the camera; the coiled limbs threshed in pain; the eyes were staring, asking, pleading…

  “No,” said Wesson, feeling his own pain like an iron cap, and he slammed his hand down on the manual control. The screen went dark. He looked up, sweating, and saw the floral picture over the console.

  The thick stems were like antennae, the leaves thoraxes, the buds like blind insect eyes. The whole picture moved slightly, endlessly, in a slow waiting rhythm.

  Wesson clutched the hard metal of the console and stared at the picture, with sweat cold on his brow, until it turned into a calm, meaningless arrangement of lines again. Then he went into the dining room, shaking, and sat down.

  After a moment he said, “Aunt Jane, does it get worse?”

  “No. From now on, it gets better.”

  “How long?” he asked vaguely.

  “One month.”

  A month, getting “better”—that was the way it had always been, with the watchman swamped and drowned, his personality submerged. Wesson thought about the men who had gone before him—Class Seven citizenship, with unlimited leisure, and Class One housing. Yes, sure—in a sanatorium.

  His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his fists clenched hard. Not me! he thought.

  He spread his hands on the cool metal to steady them. He said, “How much longer do they usually stay able to talk?”

  “You are already talking longer than any of them…”

  Then there was a blank. Wesson was vaguely aware, in snatches, of the corridor walls moving past and the console glimpsed and of a thunderous cloud of ideas that swirled around his head in a beating of wings. The aliens—what did they want? And what happened to the watchmen in Stranger Station?

  The haze receded a little, and he was in the dining room again, staring vacantly at the table. Something was wrong.

  He ate a few spoonfuls of the gruel the autochef served him, then pushed it away; the stuff tasted faintly unpleasant. The machine hummed anxiously and thrust a poached egg at him, but Wesson got up from the table.

  The Station was all but silent. The resting rhythm of the household machines throbbed in the walls, unheard. The blue-lighted living room was spread out before him like an empty stage setting, and Wesson stared as if he had never seen it before.

  He lurched to the console and stared down at the pictured alien on the screen—heavy, heavy, asprawl with pain in the darkness. The needles of the golden indicators were high, the enlarged vats almost full. It’s too much for him, Wesson thought with grim satisfaction. The peace that followed the pain had not descended as it was supposed to; no, not this time!

  He glanced up at the painting over the console—heavy crustacean limbs that swayed gracefully in the sea…

  He shook his head violently. I won’t let it; I won’t give in! He held the back of one hand close to his eyes. He saw the dozens of tiny cuneiform wrinkles stamped into the skin over the knuckles, the pale hairs sprouting, the pink shiny flesh of recent scars. I’m human, he thought. But when he let his hand fall onto the console, the bony fingers seemed to crouch like crustaceans’ legs, ready to scuttle.

  Sweating, Wesson stared into the screen. Pictured there, the alien met his eyes, and it was as if they spoke to each other, mind to mind, an instantaneous communication that needed no words. There was a piercing sweetness to it, a melting, dissolving luxury of change into something that would no longer have any pain… A pull, a calling.

  Wesson straightened up slowly, carefully, as if he held some fragile thing in his mind that must not be handled roughly, or it would disintegrate. He said hoarsely, “Aunt Jane!”

  She made some responsive noise.

  He said, “Aunt Jane, I’ve got the answer! The whole thing! Listen, now wait—listen!” He paused a moment to collect his thoughts. “When two alien cultures meet, the stronger must transform the weaker with love or hate. Remember? You said you didn’t understand what that meant. I’ll tell you what it means. When these—monsters—met Pigeon a hundred years ago on Titan, they knew we’d have to meet again. They’re spreading out, colonizing, and so are we. We haven’t got interstellar flight yet, but give us another hundred years, we’ll get it. We’ll wind up out there, where they are. And they can’t stop us. Because they’re not killers, Aunt Jane, it isn’t in them. They’re nicer than us. See, they’re like the missionaries, and we’re the South Sea Islanders. They don’t kill their enemies, oh, no—perish the thought!”

  She was trying to say something, to interrupt him, but he rushed on. “Listen! The longevity serum—that was a lucky accident. But they played it for all it’s worth. Slick and smooth. They come and give us the stuff free—they don’t ask for a thing in return. Why not? Listen.

  “They come here, and the shock of that first contact makes them sweat out that golden gook we need. Then, the last month or so, the pain always eases off. Why? Because the two minds, the human and alien, they stop fighting each other. Something gives way, it goes soft, and there’s a mixing together. And that’s where you get the human casualties of this operation—the bleary men that come out of here not even able to talk human language anymore. Oh, I suppose they’re happy—happier than I am!—because they’ve got something big and wonderful inside ’em. Something that you and I can’t even understand. But if you took them and put them together again with the aliens who spent time here, they could all live together—they’re adapted.

  “That’s what they’re aiming for!” He struck the console with his fist. “Not now—but a hundred, two hundred years from now! When we start expanding out to the stars—when we go a-conquering—we’ll have already been conquered! Not by weapons, Aunt Jane, not by hate—by love! Yes, love! Dirty, stinking, low-down, sneaking love!”

  Aunt Jane said something, a long sentence, in a high, anxious voice.

  “What?” said Wesson irritably. He couldn’t understand a word.
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br />   Aunt Jane was silent. “What, what?” Wesson demanded, pounding the console. “Have you got it through your tin head or not? What ?”

  Aunt Jane said something else, tonelessly. Once more, Wesson could not make out a single word.

  He stood frozen. Warm tears started suddenly out of his eyes. “Aunt Jane—” he said. He remembered, You are already talking longer than any of them. Too late? Too late? He tensed, then whirled and sprang to the closet where the paper books were kept. He opened the first one his hand struck.

  The black letters were alien squiggles on the page, little humped shapes, without meaning.

  The tears were coming faster, he couldn’t stop them—tears of weariness, tears of frustration, tears of hate. “Aunt Jane!” he roared.

  But it was no good. The curtain of silence had come down over his head. He was one of the vanguard—the conquered men, the ones who would get along with their strange brothers, out among the alien stars.

  The console was not working anymore; nothing worked when he wanted it. Wesson squatted in the shower stall, naked, with a soup bowl in his hands. Water droplets glistened on his hands and forearms; the pale short hairs were just springing up, drying.

  The silvery skin of reflection in the bowl gave him back nothing but a silhouette, a shadow man’s outline. He could not see his face.

  He dropped the bowl and went across the living room, shuffling the pale drifts of paper underfoot. The black lines on the paper, when his eye happened to light on them, were worm shapes, crawling things, conveying nothing. He rolled slightly in his walk; his eyes were glazed. His head twitched, every now and then, sketching a useless motion to avoid pain.

  Once the bureau chief, Gower, came to stand in his way. “You fool,” he said, his face contorted in anger, “you were supposed to go on to the end, like the rest. Now look what you’ve done!”

  “I found out, didn’t I?” Wesson mumbled, and as he brushed the man aside like a cobweb, the pain suddenly grew more intense. Wesson clasped his head in his hands with a grunt, and rocked to and fro a moment, uselessly, before he straightened and went on. The pain was coming in waves now, so tall that at their peak his vision dimmed out, violet, then gray.

  It couldn’t go on much longer. Something had to burst.

  He paused at the bloody place and slapped the metal with his palm, making the sound ring dully up into the frame of the Station: rroom… rroom…

  Faintly an echo came back: boo-oom…

  Wesson kept going, smiling a faint and meaningless smile. He was only marking tune now, waiting. Something was about to happen.

  The kitchen doorway sprouted a sudden sill and tripped him. He fell heavily, sliding on the floor, and lay without moving beneath the slick gleam of the autochef.

  The pressure was too great—the autochef’s clucking was swallowed up in the ringing pressure, and the tall gray walls buckled slowly in…

  The Station lurched.

  Wesson felt it through his chest, palms, knees, and elbows: the floor was plucked away for an instant and then swung back.

  The pain in his skull relaxed its grip a little. Wesson tried to get to his feet.

  There was an electric silence in the Station. On the second try, he got up and leaned his back against a wall. Cluck, said the autochef suddenly, hysterically, and the vent popped open, but nothing came out.

  He listened, straining to hear. What?

  The Station bounced beneath him, making his feet jump like a puppet’s; the wall slapped his back hard, shuddered, and was still; but far off through the metal cage came a long angry groan of metal, echoing, diminishing, dying. Then silence again.

  The Station held its breath. All the myriad clicking’s and pulses in the walls were suspended; in the empty rooms the lights burned with a yellow glare, and the air hung stagnant and still. The console lights in the living room glowed like witch fixes. Water in the dropped bowl, at the bottom of the shower stall, shone like quicksilver, waiting.

  The third shock came. Wesson found himself on his hands and knees, the jolt still tingling in the bones of his body, staring at the floor. The sound that filled the room ebbed away slowly and ran down into the silences—a resonant metallic sound, shuddering away now along the girders and hull plates, rattling tinnily into bolts and fittings, diminishing, noiseless, gone. The silence pressed down again.

  The floor leaped painfully under his body, one great resonant blow that shook him from head to foot.

  A muted echo of that blow came a few seconds later, as if the shock had traveled across the Station and back.

  The bed, Wesson thought, and scrambled on hands and knees through the doorway, along a floor curiously tilted, until he reached the rubbery block.

  The room burst visibly upward around him, squeezing the block flat. It dropped back as violently, leaving Wesson bouncing helplessly on the mattress, his limbs flying. It came to rest, in a long reluctant groan of metal.

  Wesson rolled up on one elbow, thinking incoherently, Air, the air lock. Another blow slammed him down into the mattress, pinched his lungs shut, while the room danced grotesquely over his head. Gasping for breath in the ringing silence, Wesson felt a slow icy chill rolling toward him across the room—and there was a pungent smell in the air. Ammonia! he thought, and the odorless, smothering methane with it.

  His cell was breached. The burst membrane was fatal—the alien’s atmosphere would kill bun.

  Wesson surged to his feet. The next shock caught him off balance, dashed him to the floor. He arose again, dazed and limping; he was still thinking confusedly, The air lock—get out.

  When he was halfway to the door, all the ceiling lights went out at once. The darkness was like a blanket around his head. It was bitter cold now in the room, and the pungent smell was sharper. Coughing, Wesson hurried forward. The floor lurched under his feet.

  Only the golden indicators burned now—full to the top, the deep vats brimming, golden-lipped, gravid, a month before the time. Wesson shuddered.

  Water spurted in the bathroom, hissing steadily on the tiles, rattling in the plastic bowl at the bottom of the shower stall. The light winked on and off again. In the dining room, he heard the autochef clucking and sighing. The freezing wind blew harder; he was numb with cold to the hips. It seemed to Wesson abruptly that he was not at the top of the sky at all, but down, down at the bottom of the sea—trapped in this steel bubble, while the dark poured in.

  The pain in his head was gone, as if it had never been there, and he understood what that meant: Up there, the great body was hanging like butcher’s carrion in the darkness. Its death struggles were over, the damage done.

  Wesson gathered a desperate breath, shouted, “Help me! The alien’s dead! He kicked the Station apart—the methane’s coming in! Get help, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

  Silence. In the smothering blackness, he remembered: She can’t understand me anymore. Even if she’s alive.

  He turned, making an animal noise in his throat. He groped his way on around the room, past the second doorway. Behind the walls, something Was dripping with a slow cold tinkle and splash, a forlorn night sound. Small, hard, floating things rapped against his legs. Then he touched a smooth curve of metal—the air lock.

  Eagerly he pushed his feeble weight against the door. It didn’t move. Cold air was rushing out around the door frame, a thin knife-cold stream, but the door itself was jammed tight.

  The suit! He should have thought of that before. If he just had some pure air to breathe and a little warmth in his fingers… But the door of the suit locker would not move, either. The ceiling must have buckled.

  And that was the end, he thought, bewildered. There were no more ways out. But there had to be… He pounded on the door until his arms would not lift anymore; it did not move. Leaning against the chill metal, he saw a single light blink on overhead.

  The room was a wild place of black shadows and swimming shapes—the book leaves, fluttering and darting in the air stream. Schools
of them beat wildly at the walls, curling over, baffled, trying again; others were swooping around the outer corridor, around and around; he could see them whirling past the doorways, dreamlike, a white drift of silent paper in the darkness.

  The acrid smell was harsher in his nostrils. Wesson choked, groping his way to the console again. He pounded it with his open hand, crying weakly—he wanted to see Earth.

  But when the little square of brightness leaped up, it was the dead body of the alien that Wesson saw.

  It hung motionless in the cavity of the Station, limbs dangling stiff and still, eyes dull. The last turn of the screw had been too much for it. But Wesson had survived…

  For a few minutes.

  The dead alien face mocked him; a whisper of memory floated into his mind: We might have been brothers… All at once Wesson passionately wanted to believe it—wanted to give in, turn back. That passed. Wearily he let himself sag into the bitter now, thinking with thin defiance, It’s done—hate wins. You’ll have to stop this big giveaway—can’t risk this happening again. And we’ll hate you for that—and when we get out to the stars—

  The world was swimming numbly away out of reach. He felt the last fit of coughing take his body, as if it were happening to someone else besides him.

  The last fluttering leaves of paper came to rest. There was a long silence in the drowned room.

  Then:

  “Paul,” said the voice of the mechanical woman brokenly; “Paul,” it said again, with the hopelessness of lost, unknown, impossible love.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 62ce3e73-dcb2-4600-9ec4-9eed0a3f2839

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 02.04.2011

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