Singularity Station

CHAPTER 14

The big battle-screen pulsed blue and then filled with the great efflorescence of the Singularity. Scanners darted about, leaving gossamer trails and bringing back only unidentifiable, almost unfathomable readings. Lientand thought of the New Settlements Bureau girl. He wondered what she must be going through now, as the ES 110 plunged into the Singularity’s fields.

“There!” yelled the field man suddenly.

On the screen, the ES 110 appeared. It hung like a broken moth against the frightful attraction of the raging depths. There could be no doubt about it. It was the ship. The superb scanners had been able to locate the ringing shards of its broken warp-shift, in spite of Maran’s maneuvers. Lientand tensed, face gray with grim pity. He would do it himself, his hand releasing the gobbeting fury that would tear across space with the force of a supernova and expunge the lives of the two human beings aboard the ES 110.

“She’ll forgive me,” he whispered to himself.

The sensor-pad in his palm demanded assent. The deadly golden pellet waited to be ejected from the long snout of the cruiser. Warning sirens shrieked to the other cruisers: beware!

Lientand breathed in deeply, the order rising to his lips.

“Sir!” shouted the young lieutenant.

Lientand almost said the word, almost released the sunburst, almost wiped out the two lives. But he stopped.

“Well?” he grated, bile in his mouth.

“Beam from Buchanan, sir!”

“Buchanan?”

The strain of the terrible seconds had left a mark. Then Lientand remembered. Buchanan. A wreck—not many years ago. And, recently, something else—

“The Jansky Station, sir! The new crewed research beacon—Buchanan at the Singularity!”

“Yes.” He remembered it now. It had seemed a strange appointment to him. Buchanan had survived a ghastly wreck, and he had been appointed to this experimental ship. “Go on.”

“We got a repeat beam—from a robot beacon. There’s a lot of distortion from the ES 110, sir. It’s heading into the Singularity—and Buchanan says the Singularity’s brewing up for starquake!”

“He’d have hoped to lose us,” said Lientand slowly. “Now he’s lost. And the girl.” He pushed the sensor-pad away. “Keep ranging. Gunners at action stations.”

He watched but they did not see the doomed ship again. All aboard the cruiser could imagine the progress of the transport as it was swept nearer and nearer the rotating, blurred ragged hole where Buchanan’s tiny station hung.

“Buchanan asked for instructions, sir,” said the young lieutenant.

“I’ll talk to him,” said the tired man.

Buchanan saw that the ship was blind, almost helpless.

Its drive left a churning, twisting shape briefly among the tongues lapping out from the Singularity. Tendrils of power snaked out from the rotating coruscation and flung it about. Buchanan sensed as a physical thing the jerking, rushing movement of the ES 110. He remembered another ship that had left him reeling with vertigo as it danced and plunged in the grip of starquake until it was at the edge of the great maw of the Singularity.

Inevitably the ES 110 must join that strange fleet, that time-lost collection of silent ships. It would be a doubly bizarre end for the expellees in their coma-cells, for they would be embalmed in the cocoon of foreverness without ever waking to their danger.

Buchanan located the cruiser squadron. They held off, coasting well beyond the Singularity’s lapping tongues. They had chased the hijacked ship until it was forced against the swirling fields of the Singularity. Their task was over. Inside the transport, Maran and those that survived would realize it. Already they must know that it was too late to surrender. When Buchanan had called to Maran, there was only the remotest of possibilities of saving the ship. Only a freak combination of fields, such as that which had saved him three years before, would enable the prison-ship to loosen the grip of the serpentine coils. The ship’s failing engines would not provide shields for long against the strange vortices. It was a doomed, dying ship.

Buchanan watched its inelegant shape as the Singularity reached out. He could sense the tumult within the Singularity through the pads in his hands. Starquake was imminent, might even now be mangling space and time. The black hole would open, the ship would lurch through—

“Starquake confirmed, sir,” a robot voice informed him.

Buchanan spoke again to the cruiser commander: “I ask again, have you any instructions for me, Commander Lientand? I have your message regarding Maran and the ES 110. This is Buchanan at the Jansky Singularity Station. I have your message. I have just seen the ES 110 begin to enter the Singularity. Starquake condition is confirmed. The ES 110 is going, Commander. Starquake emissions have the ship. No ship can hold against these conditions. I repeat, have you any instructions for me?” Not that there’s anything I can do, thought Buchanan.

“Buchanan, Jansky Station,” he called again. “The ES 110’s going.” Impelled by a macabre curiosity, he moved the station closer and closer to the doomed transport. The little station edged among increasingly powerful surgings as the effects of starquake split the dimensions. And then Buchanan saw the twisting ship clearly.

Inside it, was Maran fighting for his life? Was he trying some desperate expedient in a vain effort to hold back the blackness at the Singularity’s core?

He could not succeed. The drive was visibly failing. Buchanan watched its jagged, fading wake. Often the ship was totally obscured by the boiling waves of the Singularity’s emissions. What remained of power in the ES 110 was a weak, splintered thrust. Nothing could save Maran. There was no chance that the robotic systems could hurl a part of the ship clear of the Singularity, for the engines were dying. The little station slid nearer, a greased nut in the bizarre serpentine coils. Buchanan saw the details of the prison-ship’s last plummeting flight. Great chunks of the ship fell away. A complete engine pod burst into a nuclear holocaust, to be instantly extinguished by the weird emissions from the black hole. Snuffed out, the engine’s debris at once drifted into the core.

Buchanan was fascinated and horrified by the big infragalactic ship’s end. It was so like the last careering plunge of the Altair Star. Again, an overwhelming freak of nature was gobbling a minuscule and frail victim. Struggle as it might, the ship could do nothing.

By the time the cruiser commander acknowledged Buchanan’s reports, the ES 110 was a wreck. The Singularity’s roaring fields almost wiped out the powerfully-beamed message, but enough of it came through. Buchanan listened as he saw the prison-ship begin to fall apart.

“…Buchanan at… cruiser…. Your message received…. agreed, Buchanan, there can be no hope…. My field man’s readings… starquake emissions….” Lientand’s voice crackled. And there was a long break, so that Buchanan’s attention was diverted to the screen. But Lientand’s voice, as well as his image, came through clearly for the latter part of his message, the part that burned into Buchanan’s mind like white fire: “Especially regret the loss of the courageous woman passenger. She enabled Commander Rosario to escape just before Maran released the surviving expellees. If you can do anything to get a message to her, please do so, Buchanan. Tell her Commander Rosario is safe. And the rest of the expellees were picked up unharmed. It’s largely through her efforts that Maran was traced. I know there is nothing any of us can do to help her, but let her know at least that we are all in her debt. My instructions, Buchanan, are that you should tell Elizabeth Deffant that—” It was all Buchanan heard, for though Lientand’s voice went on the words would not register. Buchanan saw the gray face, the long jaw, the lean upright body. The beam came from a cruiser hovering beyond the Singularity’s peripheries, and it showed the commander’s image: his face, with the lips moving and words coming out slowly, a face gray with fatigue and with lines of age etched deeper by mental torment. The man was suffering, Buchanan recognized. And he was ordering him, Buchanan, to get a message to—

“…Deffant?” he whispered. “You said ‘Elizabeth Deffant’?” The shape of the commander vanished as the processes that made up the seismic monstrosity of starquake struck out and splayed the dimensions adrift. Buchanan was unable to respond.

“He said—” and moments passed as Buchanan, slit-eyed, jaws clenched, his thin face white, repeated the commander’s message. “He said—aboard the ES 110—Liz.” Thoughts spun wildly about his tormented mind. Liz? Liz Deffant on the prison-ship? Why!

It was inconceivable. Enforcement Service ships didn’t carry passengers. Their function was to take expellees to newfound star-systems, Liz had been on her way to her home planet, to Messier 16, not to the Rim of the Galaxy! Buchanan sweated coldly as seconds passed. Futile questions rang around his mind. Worse answers followed. And he would not admit that he had heard Lientand’s words.

“No,” said Buchanan.

It had been an effect of starquake distortion. That, and his own guilt feelings. He had imagined Lientand’s message. He had invented the commander’s mention of an Elizabeth Deffant because his loneliness had worked on his mind to such an extent that he had needed to hear someone mention her.

“Ravings—hallucinations,” Buchanan decided. Lientand hadn’t said anything about a woman passenger who saved commanders. Especially Lientand hadn’t said a word about a Liz Deffant who was nowhere near the Singularity—who was making for her home planet in a fit of righteous indignation at being cast off like an old shoe! Buchanan blinked. Wrong.

“He said ‘Elizabeth Deffant.’” And Buchanan reached for the writhing sensor-pads. “He did,” he repeated slowly. He called for information with a deadly calm. “Data on ES 110!” he ordered. “Possibility of a woman passenger named Elizabeth Deffant, employee of New Settlements Bureau, shipping out to Messier 16, being aboard ES 110. Soonest.”

The Grade One robot was efficient The answer came within a second: “This ship’s systems have no data on a woman named Deffant, but it’s a distinct possibility that Commander Lientand is right. As a Galactic Service employee, she would be entitled to travel on all Service ships with vacant accommodation. Regulations allow for it, sir, but not many take advantage of the facility. It’s unusual, sir, not unheard of.”

“She was going to Messier 16!”

“All the more likely, then, sir,” the machine pointed out, helpfully smashing down Buchanan’s hopes. “The ES 110 was scheduled to pass near enough for the regular shuttle to intercept, sir.” It paused. “I have a full recording of Commander Lientand’s message, sir.”

“I expect you have.”

“I thought you were denying the validity of the commander’s message, sir. It’s quite clear. A Miss Deffant is aboard the ES 110.”

Not Liz! And, with a silent plea, Buchanan accepted it. Liz Deffant was drifting away, silently spinning into the eerie depths of the Jansky Singularity. He groaned aloud. It was too macabre a coincidence, too sick a triumph of a vengeful fate. The inconceivable was happening as he watched. Liz was joining the ghost-fleet.

Maran fought the ship even as it died.

He worked in a determined frenzy, shearing off defunct systems, abandoning an engine that threatened to rip the vessel apart, calling on remote and rarely-used emergency circuits to add their power to the weak thrust of decaying engines. It could never be enough, Liz knew. The Singularity had them. The ship was wrenched about in short, bone-shaking surges. The fabric of the ES 110 was buckling. Writhing tendrils of alien energies threaded through submicroscopic orifices.

The Singularity was claiming the ship. And the ES 110 could do nothing. High-grade systems had ceased to clamor for relief. Liz found it especially frightening that no more warnings came from the robots. They recognized the impossibility of their task.

Liz cried out in true fear as a shock wave hit the ship.

Maran’s huge face streamed with sweat. He too was afraid, but for him the physical fear of personal extinction was nothing; Liz sensed his obsessive agony. He was terrified that he would never complete his ten-million year search for the moment of transition of beast to man, never range the inner depths and bring out, dripping, the gem of information that was buried somewhere beneath the overlay of a half-million lifetimes.

Liz Deffant stared, unable to restrain a choking gasp of awe at his struggle. There was a primeval force loose on the bridge: Maran, that strange elemental being that was so remote from a humanity he sought to explain, was trying to wrest the ship out of the Singularity’s grip. And it was no use. A penumbra of black light flooded the bridge. The bright-painted walls buckled. And still Maran stood at the console. Even though the ship was breaking up about him, Maran held the machines to his purpose. In a tormented delirium, Buchanan called for every particle of energy the station could exert. He drove the small vessel through the writhing, serpentine coils with the fury of desperation. The ship spun wildly, gripped on a writhing hump of uncanny forces, and eased itself toward the boiling fields where the ES 110 hung. Skills acquired in years of infragalactic flight among the reefs of hyper-space enabled him to squeeze the Jansky Station nearer and nearer the fraying transport. Liz! his mind was yelling, but he said nothing. Not until a rumble of metallic discontent came from the machines. He silenced it bitterly: “Get nearer the ES 110!”

“Sir, starquake emission reports show as yet uncharted emissions. The transport is in a configuration of maximum danger!”

“All engines at ultimate power! Any risk—get near that ship!” Buchanan watched the vessel shredding. A decaying area of black light hung around the drive housing. There was little to show that its remaining engines still functioned; a jagged scar was all that remained of one engine pod. The ES 110 trembled and fluttered like a wounded insect spuming on its axis and describing a powerless course within the serpentine coils that were drawing it into the vortex. It was the Altair Star all over again, but this time it was so much worse. Buchanan could feel Kochan’s corrosive grief as if it were his own, Liz, joining the silent long-gone who might not be dead! Not a company of expellees—not Enforcement Service crewmen who would have known the risks of their job—not impersonal strangers one could feel a real but distant pity for: it was Liz Deffant who was being taken into the black pit. And Maran.

Buchanan tried again to gain contact with the doomed ship.

“Buchanan at the Jansky Station calling Maran!” Before he had known that Liz was aboard the ES 110

he had not been able to use Maran’s name. Not directly. Now, he would do anything.

“Maran!” Even though it was hopeless, he tried. “Maran, this is Buchanan! I’m trying to get near you! This is a special research ship—I’ll try to reach you!”

But what could he do then? Within the station he was safe—it had weathered the uncertainties of the Singularity even when starquake had occurred to multiply its hazards. But how could he reach the ES 110? How could he or anyone from the ship cross the wild and bizarre regions?

Buchanan turned to the machines. Set up the possibilities, he ordered. Soon, the Grade One robot answered.

Impossible, came the reply. Impossible to build any kind of space-raft that would be capable of withstanding the stresses of the Singularity.

He ordered a fresh analysis, given the wildest freaks of chance.

It responded glumly.

Given luck, admitted the robotic controller, a gap might be found through which a small fragment of the ES 110 could be ejected into a safer framework of dimensions, perhaps even to the cruisers. But there had to be massive initial thrust. It demonstrated a series of possibilities, and Buchanan’s hopes died. With luck—with the most freakish luck, the right combination of energy fields and the abrupt force of the ship’s engines, some kind of life-raft could be blasted clear of the Singularity. Buchanan scanned estimates, forecasts, projections.

“Well?” he asked, knowing the answer.

No, the Grade One robot said judicially, not in the case of the ES 110. Its power-levels were too low. Absurdly low.

The small miracle of the Altair Star would not be repeated.

There would be not even one survivor.

Without hope, Buchanan would not give up.

“Maran! Put the woman Deffant in a life-raft!” he yelled into the blankness before him. “Yourself too—I swear I’ll try to save you! The robots say it can’t be done, but maybe I can get some kind of field rigged up—try, Maran! Get a life-raft made. For you—and the woman!” The fatigue showed in Maran’s face. His eyes were opaque, their hypnotic beauty dimmed. Through the sound of metal shrieking, force-screens Jangling appallingly, and distant systems advising that they were defunct, Liz could hear his grated orders. He would not surrender to the inevitable. The man was invested with a rage to survive, and Liz was freshly amazed at the supremacy of his vision. He played the machines as if they were delicate music, and while they gradually lapsed into quiescence he soothed them, wringing each last note of power as they died. When she recalled how she had tried to shoot him with the ponderous, archaic weapon, Liz could have wept. She felt no more bitter anger at Maran. It was a betrayal of her regard for the young man she had known for such a short time; it was a betrayal, too, of all her instincts and training; yet she could not hate Maran, either for what he had done so horribly to his deluded followers, or for the murder of the Enforcement Service personnel. There was a pitiable quality in his desperation. And she pitied him.

Al Buchanan’s voice seemed part of the nightmare at first.

“…I swear I’ll try to save you! The robots say it cant be done, but maybe I can get some kind of field rigged up—Try, Maran!” His voice rang through the black-flooding bridge. “Get a life-raft made. For you—and the woman!”

Liz realized that she had not thought of the station as a means of help. So bewildered had she been that she had thought of Al as nearby but not within possible reach. And this was his voice calling with a contained desperation to Maran! And to a woman.

Did he know she was on the ship?

“I repeat—get the woman Deffant and yourself into a life-raft!” Liz cried out in pain, relief, abandoned joy, frustrated happiness.

Maran reacted instantly. “Reciprocal contact! Get me this Buchanan!” Failing systems hoarsely assured him that they would try. He wove his big white hands over the console and armored servitors appeared. Suddenly the bridge was alive with movement, where before it had seemed a dying organism.

“Miss Deffant! This station—you know it?”

Liz tried to refuse the information. Al was trying to reach her, but Maran was a deadly threat to the hundreds who might be involved in his next series of grotesque experiments, to thousands who might follow them. But she could not. She had reached the end of her ability to resist the urge to live. Al was the voice of promised life. She could not deny the promise. And she could not speak. Intently, Maran said to her: “I thought I should never say this to another person, Miss Deffant, but I must do so. Do not think I talk to you in this way because I am afraid to die—I am not. I am talking to you as an equal—and for the first time to any man or woman!—because I care that you understand. I do care that you have the facts. That you are able to judge for yourself why I have to survive now—that I have to reach this man Buchanan who means something to you. I must have your confidence and his help, and this is why. Listen.”

And, strangely in the midst of preparations, clamorings, fee noises of the disintegrating ship and the robots’ exchanges, Liz listened with the deepest attention.

“I know,” said Maran, “that there are farsighted and dedicated men and women in positions of authority who would help me. They know the value of my work and they know that I am the only man who can do it They know Maran is unique. They admit that there should be agencies of change in the Galaxy if man is to venture beyond it. Before he can go farther out to the ends of the Universe, he must first learn to explore himself. Miss Deffant, the key to all knowledge is in here!” Maran rested his hands on his sweating head. He had the look of a visionary priest who is ready to make a prophecy.

“There are also the inhibitors who cannot yet see that what we have done in this Galaxy is only a beginning. They cannot yet see that the Galaxy is only the microcosm. And it is these malignant creatures—the men of no vision—who have decreed that Maran must live like an ape on a rock! They would send this brain, this mind, this soul, to the Rim of the Galaxy in company with a cargo of poor lost psychopaths, and condemn it to extinction.” He paused, and Liz could feel with him the sense of time passing, of visions swimming into the void unrealized, the waste, the venomous opposition of the small-minded, the soaring fantasy of his mind. “In the long-term, it is the great, creative minds that win, Miss Deffant. Always, there is more vitality in creation than in the negation of the human spirit. But in the short-term, it is the inhibitors who win. They have the authority to suppress the individual genius of a particular man. They can delay the passage of the human spirit for a measurable time—for a life-span, perhaps more. And, certainly, they can deny a Maran. They can send Maran to a bleak planet where the predators and the harsh climate make bare existence a heavy and unending battle. But Maran would begin now, Miss Deffant! Maran would change the whole direction of the human race! Maran knows where the search begins to unleash the infinitely gigantic genius of the human race! Maran can unlock the deepest wells of the human spirit!” And once more Liz Deffant saw the uncanny effects on Maran of the repetition of his name. Maran. The word boomed out in his rolling bass voice with the effect of a drumbeat. When he spoke of himself, his eyes lost their cloudiness. They shone clear, like beacons. His face lost its flat planes and swelled like a great orb. His body cowered in the gloom of the shredding vessel, and among the robots which were his acolytes, he looked like a deity. “Maran can show you as well, Miss Deffant, that the power of the human spirit can surmount even the boundaries of time!”

She did not know what he meant, and cared less. He no longer frightened her. His presence inspired her with a feeling of religious awe, and she believed that he was what he said, a man of a unique mold, one who could wrench the veils from the ultimate mysteries and discover the secret of man’s enigmatic rise from the beast.

“The station, Miss Deffant?”

“It’s a new, experimental device,” she answered. “Crewed by one man. Designed for observation of the Singularity. It has the capability to withstand all recorded emissions. It can operate at will within the peripheries of the Singularity, or so its engineers claim.”

“Buchanan?”

“My fiancée. My former fiancée.”

Maran nodded, ponderous head bending in sympathy. “He has a regard for you.”

“I believe so.”

“And you for him?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might, Miss Deffant.”

“Yes.”

“A strange meeting.”

Liz felt hollow. Too many emotions had raged within her. She needed rest. Deep oblivion. She had seen two men whose every thought had centered on a single, obsessive vision. First Buchanan, now Maran. They had bled her of energy. She was as passive as the dead leaves she and Buchanan had once kicked away as they ran through an autumn wood when the sun flickered through branches full of yellow and gold.

“Miss Deffant, I have the feeling that we were preordained to meet. You and I. Buchanan and yourself. Buchanan and I. I shall try to make the meeting possible.”

He redoubled his efforts at the console. All about the ship, failing robots answered his summons. Low-grade servitors finished the task of building a make-shift raft. Higher-grade systems shored up failing screens with the remnants of their power-sources. The entire vessel willingly gave up its last resource to insure that the god of the machines received his due. And, at last, there was reciprocal contact with the Jansky Singularity Station.

Liz heard a flat metallic voice announce the presence of the station and the man she had loved: “Jansky Singularity Station closing. Two scanners have visual contact.”

“Near,” said Maran.

“Engines operating at four percent efficiency. No reserve. Estimated drive capability at minimum levels, seven minutes at this utilization rate.”

“Seven minutes,” said Maran. “I hope your Buchanan is a man of resource.” Liz realized that she was too tired, too shocked, too used, to answer. She had no response to offer, none at all.

“This ship is in an immeasurable gravitational and electromagnetic conjunction of forces,” said the robotic controller. “Increasing in complexity and magnitude. Source is the Jansky Singularity.”

“This system can maintain a vocal contact with Commander Buchanan at the Jansky experimental station,” announced another robot system.

Liz tensed.

“Let me speak to him,” said Maran.

And Buchanan’s craggy features began to filter through the appalling vortices. Liz Deffant saw the man who had gone to search out the ghosts of the Altair Star.