Singularity Station

CHAPTER 5

The Singularity was near.

Already the vague emanations from its strange depths were impinging upon the sensitive scanners of the station. On the operations screen, which occupied almost the whole of one side of the bridge, an image of the coordinates of the Singularity was forming. Pulsing with a vicious energy, the bizarre space-time event announced its presence. Trails of discontinuous energy fields scored the region inhabited by the Singularity. It was a leprous patch on the screen, a corroding and waiting beast poised, grim, blind. Buchanan knew the configuration of the Singularity. Its unquestioned dangers he admitted; but they held no terrors for him. Soon, the robots would loose the tug and when it fell away he would point the station directly into the maw of the Singularity. But now he had other considerations. Kochan had spoken in terms that had urged new fears into his mind. The passengers and crew of the Altair Star were lost—dead, irretrievably gone, lost. Buchanan’s self-appointed task was to find why the robots had given up so easily; why they had announced that no action on their part—or on the part of any human, by implication, since they regarded themselves as far superior to humans—could possibly do anything to save the huge liner. And that task had seemed enough. To find the reason for the loss of his ship. But now there was more. Kochan had loosed fresh devils to haunt him.

Was it possible that, within the vast, rotating phenomenon, the victims of the tragedy were held in a fantastic chronoclasm?

Buchanan fed instructions to the sensor-pads in his palms. The screen cleared, pulsed with dim light, and then projected a fresh image. Buchanan stared for minutes, watching the ship’s progress. The ship—the station—coasted easily along the inner arm of a spiraling vortex that helped flip it, like some cosmic slingshot, toward the dark regions: always with economy and efficiency toward the Singularity. The ship was being handled superbly. He admitted it. He had hours now, hours in which to think over Kochan’s new and frightening ideas.

He approached the robotic controller and spoke to the cone-shaped pedestal: “The Singularity,” he said.

“Sir?” grated a metallic voice.

“Mr. Kochan left information. Give it. Begin.”

“Yes, sir.”

Buchanan watched. With growing dismay, he saw graphs, readings, projections: the foundation of Kochan’s fears. It was possible.

“That’s Maran,” agreed the guard.

The three of them looked at the lax body. A slow surge within the tank brought the bulk of the chest and belly higher. It was like the surfacing of some great creature from the lower depths. But for the eyes, it might have been a comic sight.

Liz shivered. Here was the source of the unease in the cell-deck.

“Miss, why don’t you go and look at the rest of the ship?”

The Security guard indicated a wide grav-chute at the far end of the cavernous hold. At the same time a slight shake of his head alerted Tup to Liz’s state of shock. Tup was perceptive.

“Not more like this!” Liz shuddered.

“No!” Tup said at once. “Come on, Miss Deffant—you have to see the survival-pods. What’s in them, how they’re launched. You’ll be interested—you’ve done some pioneering.” He took her arm, for once unembarrassed. “It wasn’t such a good idea bringing you down here. We’ll go down to the deck below.”

Liz allowed herself to be led past the rows of green-glowing tanks. She tried to avoid the empty stares of the expellees, but it was difficult. If she had been properly in control of herself and able to state her inclination, she would have asked to be returned to her cabin. But the slightly dazed and considerably fearful state of mind that troubled her made her suggestible. She followed Tup to a grav-chute at the far end of the cell-deck and again found herself floating downward to the further recesses of the great infragalactic vessel.

Tup rattled on cheerfully about the method of propelling the prisoners once they reached the far star at the Rim. Small, individual craft took the awakening expellees to their new lives.

“Here they are!” Tup announced. She was in a huge cargo hold. But this deck was bright and cheerful. No lines of tanks, no eerie half-lights, nothing one could easily associate with the Enforcement Service. The hold was full, however.

Liz saw scores of tall white cylinders, each one about twice the height of a man. Their purpose was obvious.

“The survival pods,” said Tup. He pointed to a small lock. “That’s where we launch them—all automatically. The expellees are shunted down here by the robot servitors, then they’re taken through a fairly slow revivifying process. When they wake up, they’re in a glide path.” Liz inspected one of the cylinders. She made out the small propulsion unit.

“We carried individual life rafts something like them, but not so small as these.”

“They’re not designed for deep-space use—though they would last for about six hours. We launch the expellees at predetermined coordinates that give them a flight of only a few minutes. Want to see inside one?”

Liz shook her head. She was still shivering, though the temperature in the hold was tolerable, comfortable even. Tup was disappointed. “Doubt if you’ll get the chance again,” he offered. “It’s bending regulations to open them, but you’d be interested.” He grinned, shy once more as he realized they were alone. “I had Pete program you on the console as a crew-member. Coming?”

“All right,” said Liz. She examined the gleaming canister without seeing it properly. There were instructions. The words did not reach her mind. There was something troubling her, but she could not quite say what. And if she had been able to identify it, she knew she would not want to speak of it. Something about the eyes…

“Look—everything they need for survival!” announced Tup as he opened one of the pods. “We launch them just outside the gaseous envelope—they glide down in a preset path. By the time he lands, the expellee is fully awakened. Ready to start again.”

Liz shook her head and concentrated dutifully; she studied the contents of the capsule with a professional eye. Tup was right. It was a neatly-designed survival pack. The expellees would not starve. The doubts and fears she had felt were pushed to the back of her mind. She checked the contents.

“Water purification plant, seasonal calculator, tools, medical outfit.”

“Simple expansion-principle weapon in unassembled form,” supplemented Tup. “Where they’re going they could run across carnivores.”

Liz glanced at the package. She was uninterested in weaponry, however primitive or quaint.

“Location of chief mineral deposits; water cycle. It’s a full ecological rundown,” Liz said. “It’s comprehensive. They’ll not starve.”

“I’ve thought of trying one of the pods out,” agreed Tup. “You know—take a vacation and live the simple life.”

“They’ll certainly be doing that,” Liz said.

“After what they’ve done, they can’t complain.”

Liz heard the edge of iron in Tup’s tone. He too was more than he seemed. A shy youth, there was resolution and authority beneath the bashful exterior.

“Well,” said Liz, with an attempt at lightness, “with that kind of rudimentary equipment they won’t be coming back.”

Tup was not smiling when he replied. “That’s the idea.”

At the entrance to the shaft that would take them up to the deck above and its grim lines of half-lit tanks, Liz hesitated. On impulse she said:

“Would you think it foolish if I said something about the cell-deck?”

“No.”

“It was the prisoner, Maran.”

“Jano Maran,” said Tup, not at all boyishly. “He worried you?”

“It was something I thought I saw.”

“Saw? Maran?”

“It was the eyes!”

Tup nodded, “It’s hard to think that they’re in a deep hypno-sleep.” Liz hesitated, feeling foolish now. But she went on with a rush: “He was watching! I’m sure he was!” Tup smiled. “Their central nervous systems are keyed into the comps. Breathing—food intake—waste products—every metabolic system is monitored. They’re held in a complex state deep below normal sleep. Getting them out of it is a long and tricky process. Each expellee has his own program for a return to consciousness. They just can’t do it on their own. Any premature awakening could be dangerous, possibly fatal They’ll be kept under until some hours before they reach the planet we’ve taken over from your Bureau. Out at the Rim. Miss Deffant, Maran wasn’t watching you. It really is impossible. Believe me?”

“Thanks,” said Liz Deffant.

They passed the rows of bobbing figures, Liz staying close to the slight figure of the young man. He was enjoying her dependence on him.

“We have complete automatic control of the expellees,” he went on, keeping to a neutral tone to show that he had no need especially to reassure her. “They feel nothing. It’s hardly necessary to monitor them, but the machines do so. We’re superfluous, really.”

“I suppose so,” said Liz Deffant. She was feeling better. The sense of oppression began to lift as they neared the next grav-chute. It would not be long before she transferred to the Messier 16 shuttle. She would not go to the cell-deck again, Liz decided.

“Ask Pete—Pete!”

The figure of the Security guard was in almost complete darkness, shadowed as he was by a bank of sensors. Tup went across, grinning.

“Aren’t we just spare parts?” he was saying, but Liz did not hear. Impelled by a compulsive curiosity, she had stopped at the tank containing the figure of the expellee Maran. It was morbid, she knew, but she wanted to make sure that she was wrong about the eyes. Those terrible eyes!

Liz looked down.

The eerie half-light played on a mottled face, a mouth wide-open, with the tongue thrusting out blackly . .

. and the eyes. Wide-open in mute appeal, but dead. Blank and dead—not unseeing, dead. And not Maran’s eyes.

Liz screamed. She knew who lay in the tank. It was the Security guard Tup had called to. She looked away, stepping backward in acute mind-reeling terror. Tup’s contorted features glared back at her. She saw big hands at his neck, holding him in a frightful clasp. Tup clawed once at the hands, and then something cracked with an abrupt, sickening finality. The hands relaxed. Tup slid toward Liz.

She knew who had killed him. The impossible had happened. It was the man from the tank: Jano Maran.