Nodding at this, the captain continued. “There’s the breath you spoke of. It is a cold thing. It is all the graveyards of history somehow put to space, and in its light-year shroud, ten billion on a billion men’s lost souls yammer for release. I—we—go to rescue them!”
“That sound is but a dumb thing, sir, mere chemistry born of chaos, now pulled by this tidal star, now hauled by that. You may as well stop your own heart as try to stop that great pale beating.”
“But if both stop at once?” said the captain, “will not my victory over it be as large as its victory over me? Small man, great traveling doom—both weigh the same when the scale is death.”
“But in rending it,” said Redleigh, in quiet desperation, “you rend your own flesh, Captain, which God has loaned you.”
“This flesh offends me!” cried the captain. “If it is all one, God manifesting himself in minerals, light, motion, dark, or sensible man, if that comet is my sister-self come preening by to try my Job-like patience, was it not blasphemy it first tried on me?
If I am God’s flesh, why was I felled, struck blind? No, no! That thing is lost and evil. Its great face hovers in the abyss. Behind its mindless glare I sense the blood that oils the cogs of nightmare and the pit.
And whether I perceive all this in hellfire man, sweet blood-mouthed cannibal shark, or huge white blinding mask flung down among the stars to frighten men and push them to impulse much less than human, more than bones and soul can bear, I must attack. Talk not of blasphemy to me, sir. It tried me at breakfast. I will dine on it tonight.”
“Oh God,” whispered Redleigh. “Oh God help us, then.”
“He does,” the captain responded. “If we are His stuffs, alive, then we sinew His arm, thrust out to stop that light-year beast. Would you turn away from this greatest hunt?”
“I would,” murmured Redleigh, “and go to check my computers, sir.”
Redleigh turned to leave, but stopped when the captain said, “Why then you’re as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust ‘reality’ and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.
Lie down with machines, rise up castrato. Sweet Jesus, you’ll make the pope’s choir yet. Such innocence quakes my bones.”
“Sir,” Redleigh responded. “I am against you. But don’t fear me. Let the captain beware the captain. Beware of yourself…sir.”
And once more Redleigh turned, and this time he walked away.
Chapter 4
I backed off and returned to my cabin, deeply distressed. I barely slept the hours remaining till dawn, instead tossing and turning in my bunk, while Quell lay undisturbed, dreaming who knows what alien dreams.
At the first bell, I rose and made my way to the communications deck. There I found crewman Small, bent over his console.
“Do you know that a rocket feeds itself in space?” he asked.
“Feeds? What do you mean?”
“It wallows,” he explained, “like a great fish in currents of solar vibration, cosmic rays, interstellar X-ray radiations. Ever hungry, we—this ship—search for banquets of shout and shriek and echo. I sit here, day in and day out, tuned to the great onrushings of space all around us. Most of the time, all I hear is variations of anonymous sound—hum and static and vibration. And once in a while, by accident…listen!”
He touched a contact and from the console speaker came voices—distinct human voices. He turned his face to mine, a strange light shining there.
As we stood, we heard broadcasts that had been made to crowds on Earth, to the listening ears of people two hundred years ago. Churchill spoke and Hitler shouted and Roosevelt answered and mobs roared; there were football and baseball games from long-ago afternoons. They rose and fell, moved in and out, like ocean waves of sound.
Small said, “No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers, and sweet autumns.”
“Mr. Small,” I said. “We must trap these broadcasts so we can hear them again and again. Is there more? What have you found?”
“We have come upon a fountain of Earth’s younger days. Voices from centuries past. Strange radio people, ghosts of laughter, political charades. Listen.”
Small fiddled with the console dial again. We heard the moment the Hindenburg went up in flames. Lindbergh landed in Paris in 1927. Someone named Dempsey fought someone named Tunney in 1925. Crowds screamed in horror, mobs cheered. And then, it began to fade away.
“We’re beyond them now,” said Small.
“Go back!” I cried. “That is our history.”
Another voice sounded from the console: “This afternoon at Number Ten Downing Street, Prime Minister Churchill…”
The captain strode onto the deck.
“Sir,” said Small. “We have found a fountain of Earth’s younger days. Voices from centuries past. Strange radio people, ghosts of laughter, political charades. Listen!”
The captain said, most sadly, “Yes, yes.” And then, suddenly, “Small, Jones, leave that now. They speak but to themselves. We cannot play, nor laugh, nor weep with them. They are dead. And we have an appointment with the real.”
Small reached again for the console dial, as a final voice announced: “Line drive! Mantle safe at first!”
Then, silence.
I touched my cheek to wipe away a tear. Why do I weep? I wondered. Those voices were not my people, my times, my ghosts. And yet once they lived. Their dust stirred in my ears, and I could not stop my eyes.
Suddenly, over the ship’s intercom, a voice boomed: “Blue alert. All scanning stations. Visual sighting. Star sector CV7. Visual sighting. Blue alert!”
Quell and I stood before his viewing screen, stunned at what we saw there.
“Great God,” I said. “What’s that?”
“A moon,” said Quell.
“Yes,” I said. “But what a moon. It looks so old. Much older than our own, covered with towns, cities, ancient gardens. How long do you think that moon has been spinning in space alone?”
Quell consulted his instrument panel, and zoomed in the picture.
“Ten thousand times a million years,” said Quell. “Oh lovely, lovely…the spires, the jeweled windows, the lonely and deserted courtyards filled with dust.”
And then we heard Redleigh’s voice: “Stand by! Diminish speed.”
And then the captain’s voice cut in: “Mr. Redleigh!”
“Sir, this moon! It’s very old and fine. Our mission is to explore, to find, to report.”
“Yes, Redleigh, I can hear it in your voice. It is a lovely lost and wandering world, an ancient beauty, passing strange, but pass it we must. Resume course.”
And over the intercom came the order: “Resume full speed. Blue alert canceled.”
The image of the lost moon, which had been projected on all the screens throughout the ship, began to pass away.
“Lost again,” said Quell.
And once again, the ship was surrounded by black space.
Chapter 5
From Small’s console came dim voices, cloaked in static, from untold miles away: “Lightfall 1 calling Cetus 7. Lightfall here. Inbound from twelve years out. Cetus 7, do you read?”
My God, I thought, another spacecraft.
Quell’s voice touched my thoughts. “Impossible. In all these billions of miles of space. What are the chances of meeting—”
“Another spaceship?” I asked aloud.
“This is Lightfall 1,” came the voice again. “Shall we hang fire, Cetus 7?”
Men were running to the main deck from every direction, crowding around monitors.
“Cetus 7, request permission to approach, link, and board.”
“Yes!” cried the crew.
“No!” thundered the captain.
“Cetus 7, please respond.”
The captain instructed Small to open a communications channel to the other ship. “Lightfall 1, this is Cetus 7. Permission denied.”
“Cetus 7— please confirm: permission denied? Do I read you?”
“You do,” our captain replied.
“But my men, Captain, listen to them!”
And over the open communications channel we hear a grand clamor from the other ship, a few thousand miles off.
“Damned fools at nursery games,” said our captain. “There is no time. No time!”
“Time?!” said the voice from Lightfall 1. “Why, for Christ’s sake, that’s all there is in space! God has a plentitude of time. And I? I am full of long years wandering and news of strange stars and terrible comets.”
“Comets?” our captain cried.
“The greatest comet in the universe, sir!” said the commander of Lightfall 1.
“Stand by, then,” our captain said. “Permission to come aboard.”
We watched on the viewscreens as the Lightfall 1 approached. Both ships reached out mechanical arms and grasped each other as friends. There was a dull thunk as the linkage was complete, and within the hour the Lightfall 1’ s captain stepped aboard the Cetus 7 and saluted.
“Jonas Enderby here, of the Lightfall 1.”
He stepped out of the airlock, and from behind him came a dozen or so crew members of the Lightfall 1—dark, light; male and female; short, tall; human and alien—glancing about them. We smiled in welcome, eager to hear their story.
Later, in the communal mess, Commander Enderby raised a glass to our captain, with whom he sat at the center table. “To your health, sir. No, mine. My God, it’s been nine months since I’ve had an honest-to-God drink. I’m with child! And that child is thirst.”
The Lightfall commander drank.
“More!” he demanded.
“More, yes,” our captain said. “And then speak.”
“Would you like to hear of comets?” said Enderby of the Lightfall 1.
“I am tuned to that,” replied our captain, a bright light glinting in his eye.
We all inched a little closer, as close as protocol would allow, to listen.
“God sickened in my face,” said Enderby. “I am not clean