Singularity Station

CHAPTER 19

The eerie journey brought a proximity desired by neither man, yet each derived a measure of comfort from the knowledge that another human being was in the cramped cabin. Pinpoints of white-gold iridescence spangled the interior. Its tiny engines groaned as shields were forced inward by the blossoming Quasi-warp. Coiling shards of black light began to build up as the glittering tunnel formed around the raft. The Singularity’s fields jerked and pushed, and the raft spun crazily as it left the station. Buchanan gave no thought to Maran. Half-forgotten scenes tumbled with appalling clarity through his mind: a child’s toy; the stunned face of a dignified old man; Preston’s refusal to believe that the machines would condemn them, his shout of protest…. The last moments of the Altair Star haunted him afresh. He could see the lost faces, the dawning horror, the slow realization that the final moment had come.

“Proceed,” ordered Maran.

The Quasi-warp, created by the station’s puking engines, reached out to the misty edges of the strange graveyard of ships.

Buchanan saw Maran’s big-boned, overfleshed face through the visor. There was a grotesque magnificence in his bulk. His eyes burned with a deep, profound, and tormented vision. Buchanan knew that he should be considering his own future actions: he should be working on some way of thwarting Maran’s escape plans. But he could not. Liz was safe. Whatever happened to Maran and himself aboard the Altair Star—and he was more sure than ever that he would reach the ship—she would be cared for.

The robots would safeguard her person. If he and Maran failed to return, they would decide that the station and its records should be preserved; and Liz with it. Perhaps Maran knew that only if Liz’s safety was assured would he willingly accompany him to the riven, time-lost ship. Buchanan firmly put down any speculation about what Maran wanted him for; it was enough that he was returning to his command. He would find the answer to the question that had tortured him for so many years, that had sustained him through the long interview with the Board, that had kept him intent and purposeful during the descents into the depths of the Singularity. Time enough to wonder about Maran when he had put to rest the ghosts of the Altair Star.

“Maran,” he said urgently. “I want to be the first to step into my ship.” He was pleading, but he did not care. “It was my command.”

“Agreed,” said Maran.

The Quasi-warp built into a thrusting, glowing spear that sliced through the unguessable forces. It merged with the strange architecture of the Singularity and allowed the life-raft to pass into the deeper regions. A small screen pulsed irregularly. Buchanan’s mind spun as the screen picked out the fantastic time-locked graveyard.

“There!” he called.

They had reached the impossible temporal discontinuity. And the images of the ancient ships filled the screen—blurred, almost unrecognizable as the deep-space vessels to the untrained eye, but immediately identifiable to Buchanan. And Maran, it seemed.

“I see, Buchanan.”

Maran fed in commands. The raft hung, shot through with the white-gold, stunning radiance and the eerie black light. Every cell in Buchanan’s body seemed invested with the Singularity’s weird effects. Yet he saw the ship.

“The Altair Star!”

The impossible warp drilled through and into the time-tunnel. Coruscating, whirling forces eddied around the raft as it glided along its sheath of translucence toward the Altair Star. Buchanan clung to the obsessive fixation that had worried and ripped at his mind for so long: why had the robots allowed so many to sink away into the glittering tunnel?

Then even that thought was gone as a sudden eddy of grotesque forces beat the Quasi-warp. Maran struggled to hold the raft, but the Singularity’s weird forces would not be denied. The little craft was hurled about with a blind, brutal frenzy of strange powers. And the two men pitched about the tiny cabin helplessly.

Buchanan’s mind reeled. He struggled for sanity, for breath, for memory. Then, there was peace. Calmness came like an explosion.

There was the boiling tumult as the Quasi-warp merged with the bizarre equilibrium of forces that made up the time-locked tunnel; and then nothing. Utter calm possessed the life-raft.

“Take over,” said Maran.

Buchanan forced his mind to clear and his hands to obey his will. But he trembled, the big gauntlets hardly able to manipulate the simple controls of the console. All was impatience, dread, incoherency, unplanned haste. Yet he could steer the battered raft through the gaping hole where the bridge of the Altair Star had once been. Terribly afraid, but unable to avoid facing the remains of the ship, he slid the raft with easy skill toward his last infragalactic command.

It was as bad as he had feared.

Buchanan ignored Maran’s restraining hand. He clambered out of the raft and crossed the ruin of the deck. All about him, the tenuous energies of the Quasi-warp shimmered and coruscated in a weird merging with the white-gold of the eerie tunnel. There was an area of complete calm where the two sets of forces met. Buchanan walked toward the splayed figures of his crewmen. Preston was there, frozen in the act of ripping out a bank of memory-coils. A crewman whose name he had never been able to remember was beside him. Both, he sensed, might move at the approach of his armored figure. Their limbs still seemed to have the elasticity of flesh and muscle that indicates life; Preston’s hair tumbled over his face—Buchanan expected him to brush it from his eyes in the familiar half-irritated gesture he knew so well. Behind these two were other figures—crewmen, three other men Buchanan had seen in the passengers’ lounges. Maybe they had some knowledge of the machines whose destruction Buchanan had ordered. Some held ripping tools. To the last, they had tried to save the ship.

Buchanan stopped, halted by an appalling, gruesome thought.

Were Kochan’s theorists right?—were these splayed figures held in some kind of shadowy hinterland, between life and death? Was the blonde-haired girl with the haunted eyes somewhere beyond the wrecked bridge, waiting in a timeless moment for the death that should have come three years before? Was it the same all over the ship?

“No!” whispered Buchanan, afraid to go on. The huge liner might be a gigantic mausoleum, as Kochan believed. But one that held the undead. He yelled out in tormented grief, quintessential terror and primeval dread striking through him as he thought of the hundreds of unliving yet undying in their time-struck ranks throughout the riven ship. Events in time seemed to telescope once more, and he saw again the uncomprehending fears of the passengers turn to grim knowledge as the ship began its last, fluttering plunge into the Singularity.

He could say nothing, nor could he move.

His soul revolted.

How long he might have stood, huge in the deep-space armor, he could not tell; perhaps he might have gone beyond the pool of calmness formed by the Quasi-warp and toward the glittering, beckoning areas where the splayed bodies hung. It could have happened, for he was oppressed by a nightmarish surge of guilt grief, and horror; a few steps would have taken him into the limbo where time seemed to have stopped.

Maran prevented any such move.

“Buchanan, I need you to direct the machines!” boomed the amplified voice. Buchanan surfaced, leaving the waking dream.

Maran. Here, in the vast charnel-house. Maran intruding in this haunting and terrible place. It was unthinkable.

He must be got out.

Buchanan turned and broke into a lunging run.

“Stop!” boomed the vast voice. “Think of Miss Deffant, Buchanan—think of yourself! Think of this ship!”

And Buchanan, having no thoughts at all, only a sense of outrage, was halted by the sheer confidence of Maran’s orders. He was brought back to a measure of sanity, and he could recall his situation, that of Liz Deffant, why and how he had reached the Altair Star and what he was to do about the pitiful, silent remains of the liner’s crew and passengers.

“Buchanan, this Quasi-warp protects us, you and me! But it can’t hold for long! I need you to help me get the robots to build a drive, Buchanan! I haven’t got enough time to redirect their programs. Help me, Buchanan, and you return to Miss Deffant at the station!”

Buchanan stared at the armored figure. He could see Maran’s anxiety. Turn Maran loose? Certainly the Altair Star’s engines could power a drive—and there was a fully-equipped boat that was capable of reaching the nearer constellations; add one or two of the big engines to its sturdy hull and you would have a ship that could cross the galaxy.

Buchanan thought of Liz Deffant. And then of Kochan’s granddaughter.

“Maran, do you know why I came here?” he said, his voice hollowly echoing around the inside of the helmet and setting up fresh echoes in the wreck of the liner.

“Yes,” said Maran, and Buchanan saw his eyes, always estimating, always planning, full of awareness. “I know, Buchanan. You came to find why you failed.”

“I didn’t fail!”

“You failed.”

“It was the robots!”

“No robot can defeat a determined man.”

“They took the screens down—they let the Altair Star sink into this!” And Buchanan indicated the glittering, menacing tunnel where the lost ships eddied slowly.

“Order the machines to build a drive, and I’ll tell you why you failed.” Buchanan felt a sense of helplessness. “You can’t escape the cruisers.”

“Buchanan, would it help if I said I believed that too?”

Buchanan could not face the self-questioning that stormed into his mind. He said quickly: “Yes, Maran!”

“Then I promise you, Buchanan, that I have every reason to believe escape from the Singularity impossible.”

“Tell me. Where I failed. Why—this.” And he gestured heavily to the gap beyond where the bridge had been, and where Preston had led the assault on the machines in the last vain effort to hold back the long night.

What did it matter that Maran should have a lifeboat, however powered? Buchanan had to know why the robots of the Altair Star had quietly surrendered seven hundred lives.

“The machines were faced with an anomaly,” said Maran.

“I know that.”

“Then you should have expected their reaction.”

Buchanan thought of the last moments of the Altair Star. Think calmly, logically, coherently, at such a time? Yet he had done what he thought best. At the Court of Inquiry there had even been congratulations.

“That’s all?”

“Buchanan, faced with the impossible, they decided that their function was at an end.” And then he could imagine the machines’ calm decision—could almost hear their flat voices, almost see the relays flickering to the inevitable conclusion.

“They gave up because—”

“Because they decided that their context could not be, Buchanan. If their surroundings were becoming impossible, so were they!”

Buchanan repeated hollowly: “If their surroundings were impossible, so were they! Everything about them could not be—could not exist!—so they stopped!”

“Now you have it,” said Maran. “Accept it.”

“You didn’t.”

Maran was almost sympathetic. “I am Maran.” He was silent for a moment, and then his voice boomed around the hulk: “Call to your machines, Buchanan.”

Buchanan laughed. He had found Maran’s weakness, The man had forgotten that the machines were outside the Quasi-warp’s protective fields.

“You’ll have to awaken the dead,” he said. “Maran, how can I reach the memory-banks?”

“Watch!”

Maran spoke and the life-raft seemed to come alive. Its small engines jerked and thrashed at his commands, and the little vessel shivered as power screamed from its drive. Dazed by the blast which rocked the big liner’s hulk, Buchanan became aware only gradually of the increasing strength of the Quasi-warp.

“Don’t!” he yelled suddenly, aware that the tenuous glories of the eerie field were creeping beyond the space where the bridge had been.

“Maran—don’t let it touch them!”

Horrified, he watched as the bizarre forces of time-locked tunnel and strange Quasi-warp met and merged. The strange warp began to invest more of the Altair Star; but Buchanan’s eyes were riveted on the splayed, fresh bodies.

“It has to be done!” boomed Maran.

“But they—they’re not dead!”

He would have hurled himself at Maran had he not been rendered stiff with fresh horror by the sight of the bodies; for, as the Quasi-warp reached them, merging with the tunnel’s coruscating white-gold, the processes of death reasserted themselves; and Buchanan saw time run its course. The bodies decayed. Preston was a ghastly gray-green sight, his handsome features billowing with mold; and, within seconds, the features had gone and only white bone remained. Time surged on and bone crumbled, turned to dust, was swept about in the gusting fields so powerfully countered by the combined drives of the station and the little raft. Buchanan breathed a prayer.

It was for himself. He did not want to think of what was happening throughout the lounges and private cabins of the Altair Star.

“They were always dead!” Maran snapped. “Buchanan, nothing can reverse death—nothing! It was held back, but that’s all—there was never anything you could do for them!” There was more than anxiety in his voice, Buchanan recognized; the man was oppressed by the aura of the doomed ship. The ghosts clamored throughout its deck, now released from some weird limbo that had held them, while outside, in the slowly wheeling Galaxy, three years had passed.

“Buchanan, order the machines to regard me as commander, and then return to the station!” Buchanan moved ponderously toward the small dust-heaps. Why not help Maran? There was nothing he could do now for the Altair Star. Its frozen moment was over. Only he was left, after the passage of the years. The time-locked tunnel had released the undead. The fabric of its grotesque white-gold fields had been burst open. Why not let Maran get what he wanted from its depths?

He passed more heaps of dust where clusters of men and women had waited. Terrified groups, facing eternity together. He reached a master-console and was not even surprised when it glowed into life at his touch. He gave the brief instructions and returned.

“Ask Miss Deffant to watch,” Maran said.

Watch what? But Buchanan did not care.

Maran moved decisively. He pointed to the battered raft, edging Buchanan toward the port. “Go back, Buchanan. Go to Miss Deffant! Tell her Maran said she should watch!”

“I’ll tell her,” said Buchanan.

The last he saw of Maran was his broad back, unnaturally huge in the deep-space armor, radiant with the fires of the Quasi-warp.