The Ballad of Beta-2 Read online

  Joneny flipped the switch and reread the two corrected lines in the ballad. So that’s what the “market” was. Then perhaps “market” did belong with “children.” Undoubtedly the correction should have been:

  “She walked through the gates and the voices died,

  She walked through the Market and the children cried.”

  Or maybe the other way. But if so, why?

  He went rapidly but thoroughly through the reports of the individual ships and concentrated especially on:

  … Beta-2 we have found to be completely empty. The long corridors are deserted, the blue lights still burning. Doors swing open, tapes are in machines only half played, utensils lie as if put down because of some interruption. At the Death’s Head there is a sight that reminds this reporter of pictures and descriptions of the Auschwitz atrocities during the so-called Second World War. It is completely jammed with skeletons, as though the population had been seized with a sudden suicide craze or else some unbelievable mass murder had been committed. Again it was semanticist Burber who called attention to the fact that all the skeletons were those of adults. This led to an examination of the Market which proved to be hopelessly non-functional. Many of the tiny glass cells in which the foetuses developed had been ruthlessly smashed. Obviously there is a connection between the two horrors but time does not allow a thorough study. Hypnotic probing on the other ships revealed an awareness of serious trouble on Beta-2 some generations back but the exact nature or extent of it is hazy, inexact and well-clouded by legend…

  Again he stopped, then ran rapidly through the brief remaining text for further mention of the Death’s Head: “Death’s Head unit,” “put into the Death’s Head,” and even “Death’s Head slope,” but no clear explanation.

  He chose another crystal, the transcription of an ancient microfilm—a report on the construction of the Star Ships in the days before interplanetary travel:

  “… is provided with a Death’s Head unit that acts as a reconverter of waste material. It can also be used as an instrument for capital punishment in those extreme cases which cannot otherwise be dealt with in such a limited community.”

  With something very like interest, Joneny turned again to the copy he had made of the ballad. There had been Market trouble on Beta-2. The Death’s Head could be used for capital punishment. Perhaps there was a meaning to the original version of stanza seven, the way the robot had first recorded it.

  “She walked through the gates and the voices cried,

  She walked through the Market and the children died,

  She walked past the court house and the judge so still,

  She walked to the bottom of Death’s Head Hill.”

  At least he had something to start with.

  III

  He sat back in the drive-hammock, staring at the black view screens that were dead to hyperspace. He was, he realized, bypassing in seconds the immense void through which the Star Ships had crept laboriously at a few thousand miles a second for a handful of centuries. Despite stirrings of an excitement that he refused to acknowledge, he still saw himself—a potential Galactic Anthropologist—on his way to track down a minute, trivial incident pertaining to a cultural dead end.

  How he yearned for the city of Nukton on Creton III, for its silvered halls, its black-stone parks—the relics of that tragic race which produced amazing architecture and music, the more amazing since it had never developed any form of speech or other means of immediate communication. Its phenomenal degree of advancement was something worth studying exhaustively.

  The slight blurring of sight as his cruiser left hyperspace snapped him back and he leaned forward in the hammock.

  Up in a corner of the screen in front of him was the greenish glow of Leffer. Close to him, hanging like a cluster of crescent moons were the starships. He counted six of them, like fingernail parings on dusty velvet. Each sphere, he knew, was some twelve miles in diameter. The other three, he reasoned, must be in eclipse and, even as he watched, the pattern of their movement—like a stately, ritualistic dance—became evident. They had been driven into a very close, delicately-balanced orbit at a forty-mile distance from one another, and in a ten-year orbit some two hundred million miles from Leffer itself.

  Slowly another crescent began to appear, while its opposite faded into obscurity. He switched the view screen to a higher wave-length and the field of black became Prussian blue, with the crescents appearing as faintly green rims of shadowy spheres.

  Joneny’s cruiser was a compact fifty-foot, chrono-drive, with a six-week time margin—which wasn’t much for star-hopping. However, they didn’t allow students more, claiming that such unreliable “youngsters” were always producing paradoxes that annoyed the hell out of Central Clearing. Some of the big ships were given a couple of years to play around with, which was a little more reasonable; for, in the shorter time, if you got yourself into some catastrophic situation with a critical moment more than six weeks in the past, you were simply out of luck. You had a choice of oscillating back and forth between critical moment and climax, while broadcasting wildly for help until someone came along and got you out (which wasn’t very likely to happen), or you just went through with it—and hoped—and there wasn’t much hope in a spatial catastrophe. As a result, the Powers-That-Be were always complaining about the number of student accidents. The whole set-up was unfair.

  At a thousand miles’ distance, he cut speed to two hundred miles an hour and crept along beside them, wondering how he was going to find out which was Beta-2. And what to do first: identify and explore the abandoned Beta-2, or talk (if they would talk) to the inhabitants of one of the other ships.

  A further question nagged him, although it had nothing to do with his research—directly. The last thing he had learned from the library crystals concerned the other empty ship, the Sigma-9:

  “… Completely gutted,” ran the voice on the crystal. “There is a great, irregular section of the hull ripped away and the skeletal interior glints under the light of Leffer with a strange iridescence. The remainder of the hull is cracked nearly in two. There is no chance that there are any survivors. It is amazing that the momentum and the automatic drive mechanism kept such a twisted wreck in flight to the ultimate goal.”

  He increased the magnification on the view screen until the spheres filled the whole wall. As he watched, another ship emerged from the cluster and there was no difficulty in identifying it as the Sigma-9. It looked like a crushed eggshell, with a fine spiderwebbing of girders feathering the edges of the cracks. The main damage was indeed an enormous area missing from the hull, from which fissures radiated in all directions, a dangling fragment here and there.

  His first thought was that there must have been a tremendous explosion inside the ship but reflection on the way that it had been constructed convinced him that any explosion of a magnitude sufficient to tear out such a large section of the hull would have forced the remainder apart. Laws learned in his course in Collidal Physics ruled out any exterior impact. It was, in fact, a completely impossible kind of wreckage. But there it hung, directly in front of him.

  He let the mechano take him into the cluster and switched the screen to normal magnification, watching the great spheres grow. When he was seventy miles from the nearest one, he stopped the cruiser again and studied it, without result. Finally, at a speed of only seventy miles an hour (giving himself time for further reflection), he moved in. At the forty-two second mark, he jammed on the Time Stop.

  And time stopped.

  For all practical purposes, he was in an envelope of chronological stasis, his cruiser perhaps ten feet above the surface of a starship. He switched the screen to mobile vision, and the image grew until it surrounded him. He lowered the view-pointer until he seemed to be standing on the hull. Then he looked around.

  The horizon was frighteningly close and the plates which he had expected to be smooth and even looked like gnawed cheese: they were rotten, crystallized into ruts and flaking mounds, green with a color of their own, deeper than the light lent by the far sun. He looked up.

  And stopped breathing. Fourteen times the size of the appearance of the moon from Earth, hung the Sigma-9. He knew that nothing moved in this stasis. He knew he was safely in his ship, minutes away from a dozen stars and their safe planets. Yet the looming, gutted wreck seemed to be careening toward him through the blackness.

  He screamed, threw one hand over his eyes and jammed the other against the mobile vision switch. Quivering, he was back in his ship; the view screen was only a six foot window in front of him once more.

  No. The mind was still not ready for unlimited space. Even the edge of an air-helmet window was something corporeal to hang onto. But the wreck itself, shimmering with green fire: there was something terrible, so that he had been unable to watch it directly for more than a second before he felt it was falling to engulf him—shimmering?

  Joneny took his moist palm off the hammock arm. Shimmering? It must have been part of the optical illusion of the wreck’s falling. He was in time stasis. Nothing could be shimmering. But he remembered the gaseous green glow that seemed to spark over the wreck. He swung the view screen up to take another look at Sigma-9, this time from the psychological safety of his seat. Green and broken, it shimmered against space.

  Panic caught his stomach. Something must be wrong with the time margin. His eyes flashed over dead warning lights. Nothing was out of place. He was about to jettison himself into hyperspace before something went really haywire, but his hand stopped. There was Leffer. He switched on a filter and increased magnification.

  A sun’s surface under time stasis looks very different from the view under normal timeflow. Something known as Keefen’s Effect makes it look like a rubber ball dipped
in glue, then rolled in parti-colored glitter. Each color shines out in a separate dot, distinct and prismatic; under ordinary chronology, it has the texture of fluorescent orange peel. Keefen’s Effect was in full display.

  So he was in time stasis. But something was going on around Sigma-9 that didn’t care.

  At a crawl of fifteen miles an hour he switched back to normal flow and began looking for an entrance. It was a corroded blister on the hull, and he hovered above the lock, for the hell of it, broadcasting his identity beam to see what it netted. To his surprise a voice came through his speaker in accented English:

  “Your ears are unplugged but your eyes are black. Your ears are unplugged but your eyes are black. No admittance while your eyes are black. Please identify yourself. Over.”

  The voice was static, from an automatic answering station, but its message left him bewildered. He sent out his identity beam again and this time spoke as well: “If this is a robot answering, please get a human agent to let me in. I’d like to talk to a human agent.”

  “Your ears are free of wax, free and unplugged,” came the voice again. “But your eyes are blind. We can’t see you at all.”

  Then Joneny got the idea. The robot could apparently discern articulation changes. He wants my visual as well, Joneny thought. He put an image of himself through on a simple ban and waited for a return picture on the screen.

  “Your eyes see clearly. Just a moment and we will give you an entrance pattern.”

  In a corner of the viewing screen the flickering black and white pattern appeared, a series of white circles and black lines. Across it was written in block letters:

  YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE CITY OF GAMMA-5

  Below, one of the blisters began to turn. The shuttle ships it had been built to accommodate were almost three times the size of Joneny’s cruiser. Shalings from the crystallized hull broke off in chunks and sent a drift of fine powder. Rotating, it sunk and divided into thirds, slipping back into the ship’s hull. A mechano maneuvered Joneny’s cruiser over the tunnel. As the ship turned, Joneny glimpsed the Sigma-9 on the view screen and remembered what he had said to the professor: “What could be safer than interstellar space, sir?” The ships had supposedly indestructible drives, and hulls of infinite strength. What had chewed up the plating, or had smashed the Sigma-9 like a porcelain shell? He resolved his curiosity by determining to consult the ship’s tiny iridium cell computer on the problem and see if it could suggest any answer from a measurement of the stresses and strains still held in the shattered metal. Before he was finished, he would go over and make an extensive investigation. Even the first reporters had done no valuable research. As the triple doors of the first lock closed, he made a disgusted sound and waited for the landing process to finish.

  The ship jarred and the indicator light for the repeller field flashed. These locks were designed to hold much bigger ships: the grapplers were groping in thin vacuum. The field held the ship centered in the lock, but the grapplers were too short. He increased the consistency of the repeller field to that of titanium steel twenty feet out from his cruiser in all directions. Let them sink their claws into that. Clunk. They did. A voice came through the speaker:

  “Prepare for debarkation.”

  Here goes nothing, Joneny thought. The pressure in the lock was Earth-normal. What about the rest of the starship? The robots should have sense enough not to allow admittance if there was anything wrong. Just in case he slipped a pressure gell in with his survival kit. He checked the powerpack on his belt, tied his left sandal thong which had come undone, and went to the door.

  Selector fields had made double airlocks obsolete. The iris of metal rolled away and he was looking across the inside of the starship’s lock to where the flexible entrance tube had stuck against the side of the repeller field.

  Though Joneny’s ship had a comfortable semblance of gravity, the starship was in free fall. He launched himself across and felt weight leave him. Then the round end of the tube moved up to engulf him like the mouth of a lamprey eel. The light was soft blue-white. Inside the tube he brought himself to a halt by pressing a button on his power belt. He caught hold of the rail running down the side of the tube and hauled himself along.

  Rectangular windows looked out into the rest of the lock, ill lit with the same blue-white. Fifteen feet later the ribbed wall turned to smooth steel and the windows ceased. He’d come to the body of the ship. He turned as a faint sound behind him lisped through the tube. A triple jaw clamped over the mouth of the passage. It was comparatively cool in the tube and a breeze was coming from someplace. He reached the end.

  Running off in both directions was a triangular corridor. A spiral bar wound through the middle. An arrow pointing one way said, “RECREATION HALL” and one pointing the other said, “NAVIGATION OFFICES.” Joneny’s English was of the scholarly type: conversationally adept, but including few technical words since they had almost all been superceded. He was acquainted with a good number of latinate roots that were supposed to help one out of obscure translation situations.

  After racking his mind he decided that the Navigation Offices would prove more interesting. He was a little curious to see what they recreated down the first corridor, as well as what sort of recreation system they could have. But the idea of sacrifices to the sea left him completely bewildered, so he headed in that direction.

  A moment later he came to a small room. A large post rose in the center. Around the wall were screens, dials, and seats before numerous desks. The bulkhead was metal, so Joneny put a light magnetic field on his sandal soles, drifted to the floor and went click. He glanced at the desks. Obviously this part of the ship had had gravity at one time.

  “Just a moment,” a voice said through a speaker. “I will try to locate a human agent to deal with you as requested.”

  “Thanks,” Joneny answered the robot. “Where is everybody around here anyway?”

  “Too complicated a question. I will try to locate a human agent.” After five seconds of silence, the speaker said, “No human agent can be found who will respond. Apologies, sir.”

  “Aren’t any people left alive on this ship?” asked Joneny.

  “People are alive,” answered the robot. The flat, automaton voice sounded unintentionally menacing.

  On the desk was a pile of books. Books! Real books were Joneny’s delight. Heavy, cumbersome, difficult to store, they were the bane of most scholars. Joneny found them entracing. He didn’t care what was in them. Any book today was so old that each word glittered to him like the facet of a lost gem. The whole conception of a book was so at odds with this compressed, crowded, breakneck era that he was put into ecstasy by the simple heft of the paper. His own collection, some seventy volumes, was considered a pretentious luxury by everyone at the University. The glory of the collection, each page impregnated with plastic, was the Manhattan Telephone Directory for 1975.