Singularity Station

CHAPTER 11

“The assignment is one of observation, not investigation, sir! I have to remind you—” Buchanan suffered the arguments for five minutes. It was right. The machine was programmed to remind him of his primary task. Then he grew tired of argument.

“Now.”

He was too tense to relax in the comfortable command-chair. Ratlike sensors writhed into his palms. And still the robotic controller pointed out that it was his task to report on the Jansky Singularity, not to enter it.

“I am assuming command,” he said. “No more questions, no more advice.”

“Sir—”

“The station is within the Singularity’s parameters.”

“This Grade One robot agrees,” it said reluctantly. “Therefore command decisions rest with the commander of the Jansky Singularity Station. And you, Commander Buchanan, are the commander of the Jansky Singularity Station.”

“In. Now.”

“Yes, sir. According to your instructions.”

It was the Altair Star engulfment all over again. Buchanan waited, filled with dread, fearing more than death. But huge engines surged to combat the grip of the Singularity’s fields. The station nicked inward, rolling into the rotating, glowing phenomenon. Shields sprang out to counteract grotesque forces. The station vanished into the Singularity.

Across the spiraling arms of the Galaxy, long gray cruisers turned and activated drives seldom used. They blasted through endless reaches of infragalactic space, across the starways of the dimensions and clear through to the gulfs where two survival-cylinders drifted in the wake of the ES 110. The commander of the nearest cruiser gave sharp, terse orders. The spaceways began to empty. Passenger liners wheeled away into safer regions; colossal cargo-ships ten miles long and crewed by servo-robots lumbered out of the cruisers’ field of fire; tiny yachts shot into contiguous quadrants yapping out irate questions. There were no answers.

Soon, the gray-black snout of the cruiser drifted near the slowly-tumbling cylinders. Force-fields sprang out and the enigmatic pods were drawn inboard, still flooding the beamer-channels with their siren-blasts: Red Alert! Red Alert! All Enforcement Service ships rebeam! Red Alert! The noise was cut off abruptly. Three cruisers could handle anything known in the Galaxy, possibly in the Universe. They were the striking force of the Service. Their armament was always in a state of readiness. Tensely the crew waited as armored robots filleted the survival-pods. They took no chances. Blast-walls protected them, radiation-suits encased them; and it was left to the servo-robots to recover the contents of the pods. But when they saw the badly-wounded man, immobile, drugged, half conscious but still struggling to frame his message, they raced to him.

He said one word, but that was enough. Loaded with partially-suppressed agony, he breathed:

“Maran!” And then he began his fight for life. The ship’s commander, a tall gray-haired man whose days in the Service were almost at an end, did not reveal his thoughts as he gazed at the leaden, shrunken face.

“He’ll make it,” offered the medical officer. The commander nodded. “If he says anything else, let me know.” A youngish lieutenant burst out: “Why wasn’t there anyone in the other pod—why two of them? How could Rosario have launched two pods?”

The commander was thinking of Maran. Maran loose: free to begin that frightful series of neural operations…. “We’ll know when we reach the ES 110,” he told the young officer. He crossed to the gray metal coldly-functional console. Robotic servo-mechanisms sensed his nearness and awaited his orders. The cruisers were the only ships programmed for complete and unquestioned control by human personnel. There were those in positions of power who questioned the wisdom of risking fallible human discretion, but the members of the Service had so far persuaded the Galactic Council that the robots could not cope with the situations in which they might find themselves. They had not the resources for the kind of decision that occasionally must be made.

The commander spoke to his field man: “Link with the squadron. Try a combined submolecular field. I want the ship intact.”

Liz Deffant’s hands were steady as she pieced together the surprisingly elaborate mechanism. Several screws had to be wound into place. There was a sighting apparatus—merely a notch, but it would be adequate. The weapon had a short range. About a hundred yards, Liz guessed. A small hammer held the flint. There were springs, ratchets, a flashpan. All had to be in alignment. The propulsive force was a black powder, a mixture of easily-available chemicals. Out at the Rim, the expellees would have no difficulty in locating sources for the primary materials. Before a year or so passed, they would be able to manufacture simple tools like this for themselves. Pour the grains of powder into the upturned barrel of the weapon, she read. She split the cartridge and made a wadding from the cartridge-paper.

Prime the weapon by placing a pinch of powder in the priming-pan. Liz wondered if her fingers were sweating too much. She wiped them free of moisture. A misfire could occur; she would have only one chance, for the process of preparing the weapon for firing had already taken over a minute. Tap the projectile into the barrel, using the ramrod. Take care not to distort the shape of the projectile.

The bullet rested on the wadding. All about her, Liz sensed the interest of robot eyes. She could have wept with fear. It was an absurd situation, ridiculous. A chance encounter with a friend of Al’s had led to this distillation of terror, to this gagging range of emotions which had previously been unknown territory. She was bitterly afraid. The determination that had kept her from leaving the ES 110 was almost entirely dissipated. She could not begin to understand why her fingers continued to prepare the barrel-loading, archaic musket, for there was no directing force behind the movement.

They were a part of a pattern of events which had encompassed her. She felt as if she, too, were a part of the robotic equipment of the prison-ship, a preprogrammed and mindless complex of nerve and tissue that was a part of the spatial and temporal framework of events beginning with the sight of Tup’s dying face, and taking in the horrors of the past few hours. The situation had grown around her. She had grown into it. There was a terrible inevitability in it.

She took the heavy weapon, careful to close the priming-pan. Tears streamed down her face as she began to walk toward the wide grav-chute. It led to the clamorous horror of the cell-deck, to the puzzled low-grade servitors, to the tanks where the expellees writhed, and to the splayed, silent body of the naive crewman she had known as Tup. And, somehow, she could negotiate the silent, eerie green-lit deck. The robots had finished their work. Many tanks were empty. The dead crewmen were gone. She knew that unseen scanners reported her presence. Twice she saw groups of low-grade servitors, but they did not attempt to hinder her.

She had known at once that Maran would not be on the deck. She grasped the musket in almost nerveless fingers, feeling the smooth stock, the heavy barrel, the delicate priming mechanism. Icy sweat covered her face and hands. Maran would be on the bridge.

“Al, I wish we hadn’t parted like that,” she whispered. When she began the quick ascent to the bridge, she could recall every line of his face. She had stormed away from him filled with a bitter rage, and she could see now the poignant hurt in his eyes. The sense of loss was almost unbearable. After the green-lit half-light of the lower deck, the bridge was startlingly bright. Liz Deffant stepped out of the chute, narrowed her eyes against the flooding light, and sought out Maran. The musket almost slipped from her hand. Two things immediately impacted on her mind: two low-grade servitors were very close to her; and Maran stood squarely before her, outlined against the bulk of the robotic controller’s pedestal. He seemed to have been waiting like that for aeons. His great body was clad in black. There was a half-smile on his face, so that Liz had the feeling that he would come toward her almost indulgently. His eyes were nearly beautiful, she thought inconsequentially, more a woman’s eyes than a man’s. His eyebrows were perfectly curved above the heavy-lashed, wide-set eyes,

Liz raised the musket and, enwrapped in her strange trance, she had a prevision of a third eye opening redly above the pair that were regarding her. The projectile was heavy, round, metallic and in a tenth of a second it would smash through the large skull and Maran would be no threat to anyone. The trigger curved in a bow against her finger.

Maran made a small gesture with his large, white hands. Liz had the impression of ponderous movement. The sights of the weapon were exactly aligned on the center of Maran’s forehead. Maran said with massive calmness: “Miss Deffant, do you really know what—” The rest was lost.

She nicked the priming-pan open, noticed in a frozen moment of time that a few grains of powder had clung to her damp fingers, and then she pulled with increasing power on the trigger. The flint snapped down.

Fire blossomed, red and yellow. Smoke gushed from the priming-pan and the barrel, and Liz was hurled backward by the recoil. She did not know whether she was glad, relieved, horrified, amazed, or empty of emotion.

The smoke cleared.

Maran had not fallen.

The clear brown eyes were not glazing in death, as the young crewman’s had. And there was no third eye. Liz knew cold, clawing fear.

She stepped back half a pace, her shoulder raw and full of pain, and then she could not step back. A black tentacle carefully detached her hands from the metal of the musket. Maran came toward her, and Liz opened her mouth in pure, blind panic.

She could hear the echoes of her scream bounding back from the cheerful pastel-colored walls. When she moved, delicate tentacles restrained her. And Maran stopped.

The half-smile had gone. There was a look of sadness on his face, that of a large man who knows that, in spite of his harmless nature, the sheer physical bulk of his body inspired fear in others. Liz held onto her sanity, gagging down her bile. She realized that he was talking to her.

“Miss Deffant,” he was saying for the second or third time. “Miss Deffant—was it you who released the survival-cylinders? Miss Deffant?”

Liz repressed a shuddering sigh. He would want his revenge. The man was a merciless, obsessed psychopath. All human emotions had died within him; he lived only for some bizarre vision. And this was the man she thought could be right about the need for investigation into the nature of the only intelligent life in the Galaxy. She wondered if he would kill her now.

“Yes!” she spat at him. “I did it—and the whole Quadrant is repeating the Red Alert! Every Enforcement Service ship in the fleet will be after you!” She almost dared him to kill her, but she could not. There was too much animal fear in her. She could not challenge him so directly, not after what he had done so easily to the guard and the young crewman. She could only wait.

“It was the bravest thing I’ve ever known,” Maran said.

Liz shuddered, awaiting a blow, the condemnation to some vile form of death, instructions to the robots to dispose of her—for anything but this. What had Maran said? That her action was the bravest thing he had ever known? He was sincere.

There could be no doubt, for his face expressed only an admiring interest. The grim mask she had first seen glaring wildly about the green-lit hell of the cell-deck had changed into this benevolent visage. Maran was looking at her with the indulgent air of a schoolmaster glad that his pupil had absorbed her lesson well.

“I tried to kill you,” she heard herself whispering.

“Yes.”

“The cruisers will take you.” Liz felt again the uncanny sense of detachment from the situation. It was almost as if the words were spoken by another woman.

“Possibly,” Maran said.

“They will!” She could challenge him now.

“Quite possibly, Miss Deffant.” He was quite calm. Liz could begin to understand the power of the man. He was massively indifferent to her attempt on his life.

Shuddering afresh, she said: “I would have killed you.”

“You thought I was some kind of monster.”

He accepted it. Tears trickled down Liz’s face and she was bitterly ashamed of herself for them; for she knew that they came with the relief of knowing that she would not be killed. Maran would not harm her. The great white hooks of hands would not reach out….

“Sit down, Miss Deffant. You are almost exhausted. If you make no sudden move toward a possible weapon, the machines will ignore you.”

“They stopped me from—”

“I watched you come from the lower deck, Miss Deffant. I wondered if you would have the courage to carry through your plan.” The great brown eyes were full of warmth. “The servitors were programmed to disturb your aim only if it was accurate. It was.” He pointed to a white metallic scar above him. Liz could see the long line of the leaden projectile splashing the ceiling with its track. She sat down, aware of Maran, of the robots’ careful scrutiny, of her own shaking hands; and also of her own resignation. A voice that she knew as her own said: “Did you have to kill them?” Maran sighed. There was an indisputable sadness in his voice, a real regret in his face when he answered.

“When I was able to get out of the tank, I was still in a deep conditioning, Miss Deffant. You were right to be afraid when you first saw me. That was a monster, that creature who destroyed two lives—when threatened, it acted at the most primitive level in the most direct way.” His eyes were hypnotically attractive. Liz felt her anger dying away. “That creature is gone, Miss Deffant. You see before you only—Maran.”

And he was not looking at her, but through her. She sensed the evocative power of his name: repeating his own name had a talismatic effect. It reestablished him, gave assurance to his remote and majestic vision, substance to his belief in his rightness, in his destiny. Liz shivered. A pale reminder of her furious determination echoed in her mind: she had known that Maran would have a plan to evade the cruisers. That was why she had assembled the archaic firearm from the survival-cylinder; even now Maran’s incredible mind would be building a strategy for survival. And there was nothing she could do, nothing at all.

And there it was, thought Buchanan. The electromagnetic conundrum, the gravitational enigma, the terrible Singularity, that contained the most bizarre architecture of any object in the Galaxy. Around the station, pulsing with incomprehensible powers, the core of the Singularity set in motion force-fields that were beyond measurement.

Buchanan held back a prayer as the three huge engines bit into the straining coils. They gripped the station. Buchanan could feel the very deck beneath him curving slightly in response to the gigantic flood of power from the three pods. The engines surged, bit, and the serpentine coils relaxed. The coils glistened. They backed away like scorched snakes.

The makers of the station had foreseen the uncanny power of the Singularity. The engines surged again. And they held the web of coiled forces emanating from the darkness at the center of the Singularity. The screen of the station projected red-banded submolecular fields, and Buchanan wiped the sweat from his face. He watched and lost himself in the marvel of the machines.

The Singularity was an imponderable, a freak. But human ingenuity had defeated the fantastic vortex. The small, squat, ugly vessel hung at the edge of Beyond. But it was not drawn into the gaping maw of the terrible Singularity. It survived.

It had survived, thought Buchanan, with a sudden accession of pride. The Jansky Singularity Station truly existed! Built with a single purpose in mind, it was a technological marvel. But a marvel of limited scope. Three colossal engines, each enough to power a vast infra-galactic ship. Stupendously overpowered, absurdly potent.

None of this power usable in warp-shift, all of it directed toward containment. To hold back the forces of black night. To keep the station swanning through the edges of the Singularity. And more, thought Buchanan. It had done more. Even within the Singularity, the station was safe. Its shields could divert the stupendous and bizarre vortices of the Singularity. They heaved, struck, and glissaded away. The station slid out of the serpent’s coils.

Buchanan experimented with the strange dimensions.

The station clawed into a furious maelstrom.

Buchanan’s senses reeled as the ship was flung about in the depths. He eased the ship into a calmer region. The robot controls in his palms translated his commands into action. Creaking with monstrous powers, the engines held a strange equilibrium in the weird hmer depths. Then Buchanan saw what he sought.

“Dear God!” he whispered as the maelstrom’s fantastic energies fell away and he saw into a corridor of unholy calm. “The ship!”

It was the strange graveyard of ships he had glimpsed before the descent into the Singularity. And there was his lost command!

He sweated as the screened image of the Altair Star was steady for long moments. The ruin held a lonely, frozen space among the other ships of long ago. The scanners ranged closer. He could see details. There were the marks of that ferocious wrecking when the bridge was ripped away. An engine hung clear of the ship, torn away as if by a kraken. But what of the silent crew and passengers? What of the silent company of the dead? Or the undead!

“Readings!” he snapped to the robotic controller. “How near—how soon!”

“Sir?”

“The Altair Star—there!”

“This automaton installation has records of the Altair Star lost three years ago. You want the details, Commander?”

It knew, of course, of his past. The machines had their own subtle ways of passing on information. The Grade One system that was now at his command knew quite well that he had once been the chief officer on the Altair Star.

“She’s there! You must have readings—I can see it on the screen! The scanners must have assessed the parameters! I’m sure it’s a steady-state!”

“No data, Commander,” the machine said.

Buchanan grew angry. The machines were ranged against him.

“I can see it! You must have readings!”

“Of what, sir?”

“The Altair Star!”

“No readings, Commander.”

Buchanan contained his excitement. He determined on reason rather than rage. You couldn’t hate machines. You could try not to. In fact, you could not manage without them, he told himself. However much you could do on your own, you needed them, every last system of the millions aboard the station. Understand the robot, Buchanan ordered himself. Why was it refusing to admit the Altair Star lay within the deep well of the Singularity?

The sensors in his wet palms fed in continuous streams of information: the ship’s energy levels; the reserves of power available in the three great engines; estimated characteristics of electromagnetic forces emanating from the center of the vast web of the Singularity. Nothing on the eerie tunnel that contained the ships!

“Scan!” ordered Buchanan again. “There!”

The screen changed at his direction. Buchanan ranged closer. The Altair Star’s hulk came nearer. He could make out details of ports and scanner-housings. And something else. All about the ship was a glistening cocoon of black-gold pinpoints of light.

“Still no readings?” asked Buchanan.

“Of what, Commander?”

“The Altair Star.”

“The Altair Star was a total loss, Commander.”

“Even though I can see it now?”

The machine was silent for minutes. Buchanan could imagine the endless circuits far below him, all searching for an answer. At last it spoke, and again the Grade One robot retreated into unknowledge.

“This installation cannot register the impossible, Commander.”

“Impossible,” breathed Buchanan.

The strange graveyard that existed within the rotating fury of the Singularity was impossible. And yet it lay there, in an eerie matrix of forever.

But the robots could not—would not acknowledge it. The strange timeless tunnel did not exist. It was impossible.

So it did not exist.

How could he convince the machines otherwise? If he were to go closer, he needed the massive resources of the station’s robots. He needed the robots and their instant technology. Warning impulses roared through the nerve-endings of his palms. He ignored them, mesmerized by the sight of the Altair Star. He had to get aboard that ill-fated vessel!

“Commander Buchanan!” the robotic controller called. “High field momentum from the Singularity core!

Action necessary!”

Buchanan still watched, and it was only when the frosted, glittering Altair Star began to disappear behind strangely alive coils of imponderable forces that he shook himself free of his ghost-ship’s spell.

“Well?” he asked.

“Commander Buchanan, core emissions indicate maximum danger.” The station juddered as its screens adapted themselves to the huge energies flowing from the bizarre center of the Singularity. Buchanan saw the screen shiver and dissolve. The scanners roved the Singularity.

Then Buchanan lost interest in the Altair Star, for a probing scanner ranged deep into the central core. He saw into the very womb of Singularity, the hole that gave birth to the wild, incomprehensible and deadly monster that dominated the Quadrant.

“The hole,” whispered Buchanan.

Seemingly empty, black, formless, and yet having properties of shape, it was a gap that held neither time nor space.

“Go!” Buchanan called, suddenly more afraid than he had been for three years. “Go!”

“Starquake,” commented the robotic controller. “Commander Buchanan—starquake! The station is in danger, sir!”

Still awed, Buchanan punched orders into the console.

The station’s three storehouses of energy screamed with effort. Roaring, pulsing, blasting, they countered the ferocious unguessable emissions from the black hole. Yet Buchanan still watched that uncanny gap in the cosmos, even as the station began to slide away from the seismic disturbances. He held the scanner locked onto the eerie black hole until the station abruptly bit with great fangs into the serpentine coils that embraced it.

Slowly the station heaved itself away from the furious storms of the inner depths. It clawed out and away from the frightful emissions.

Buchanan could still see that terrible emptiness long after the scanner was unable to range on it. The black hole had imprinted itself on his mind; it was an afterimage on the retina, one that would not leave him.

There was a cosmic mystery here: Buchanan was almost stupefied by the otherness of what he had seen. The black hole belonged to no part of the Galaxy.

It was the ultimate mystery, the ultimate danger. Buchanan felt drained, spent, utterly fatigued. Some hours passed before he could concentrate on his self-imposed task. Buchanan slowly recovered. There was no slackening of his resolve. Starquake had not dismayed him. The eerie black hole had left him shocked but not overwhelmed. The strange graveyard was terrifying, but he could face it. Buchanan looked at the robot’s cone-shaped pedestal.

Somehow he had to convince the machines that what he had seen was possible. That the huge Sargasso Sea and its wrecks were not beyond reach.

There was one source of comfort. The station had proved itself. Even the frightfulness of starquake could not dent its shields. They had held, just as the engineers promised. But God help any ship that came near the Singularity now!