The Invincible (21 page)

“The safest method is nevertheless changing the cloud’s conditions for existence by lowering the average intensity of radiation,” said Sarner. “Four hydrogen bombs, fifty to one hundred megatons each, over each hemisphere, that means altogether about 800 megatons, would be sufficient. The water in the oceans would evaporate. As a result the planet’s cloud cover would become denser, the albedo would increase and the symbiotic partners on the ground could no longer give off the required minimum of energy needed for their multiplication.”

“The equation won’t balance out,” objected Jazon. Seeing that the discussion threatened to turn into a technical dispute, Rohan stepped away from the door and went on.

Instead of taking the elevator again, he returned by a metal spiral staircase which was rarely used. As he passed one level after the other he saw the repair shops, where De Vries’ mechanics were working on the dark, motionless Arctanes as sparks showered from their welding torches. Far away he noticed the tiny windows of the sick bay, spreading a soft lilac-colored glow. A physician in a white coat noiselessly hurried along one of the corridors, followed by a small automaton carrying a tray with glittering instruments. Rohan walked past the dark and deserted mess halls, the club rooms, the library, and finally reached his own level. He slowed down near the astrogator’s cabin, as if he wanted to stop and listen here too. But no sound came through the smooth door, not even a light ray, and the portholes were bolted down with copper nuts. Not until he was back in his cabin did he feel how tired he was. His arms hung numbly at his sides. Heavily he plunked himself down on his bunk, kicked off his shoes and folded his hands behind his neck, staring up at the low, poorly lit ceiling, whose blue paint showed a long crack right in the middle.

Neither a sense of duty nor curiosity about other people’s private affairs and conversations had driven him to roam through the spaceship. He was simply afraid of the lonely night, for that was the time when he was troubled by images he would have liked to forget. Worst was the memory of the man he had shot at close range to prevent him from killing the others. He had been forced to shoot him, but that didn’t make things any easier. He knew the moment he turned off the light he would have to relive the scene, see the man in front of him again who with a dull smile obeyed the Weyr gun in his hand, while he stepped across the dead man lying on the rocks, his arm torn off.

The dead man was Jarg, who had returned, and who—after having been saved by some miracle—now had to die such a senseless death. Seconds later the other man, his protective suit smoldering and shred to pieces across his chest, would collapse over Jarg’s body. In vain Rohan tried to chase away these images that, against his will, kept appearing before his eyes—he could smell again the sharp odor of ozone, the hot recoil of the butt tightly grasped by his sweating fingers—he could hear again the men’s whimpers as he chased them, panting and wheezing, and then dragged them one by one, tying them up in bundles like sheaves of corn. And each time he shuddered to the core of his innermost being when he peered into the desperate helplessness of the familiar faces, into their blind, unseeing eyes.

A dull thud—the book he had once started to read back in the space station had fallen to the floor. He had put a white slip of paper inside to use as a bookmark, but he had not read a single line. Who had time for reading? He stretched out on his bunk, thinking of the scientists who were now sitting together concocting plans to destroy the cloud, and his lips drew up in a scornful smile. What absurdity, he thought. They want to destroy, and so do we. Everyone wants to destroy that certain something, but it won’t save anyone. The planet Regis is uninhabited; man has no business being there. Why be so grimly stubborn? It’s no different than if the men had perished in an earthquake or a thunderstorm. We haven’t been confronted by someone’s conscious, purposeful effort, or some hostile will. Nothing but an inorganic process of self-organization… Is it worth wasting our energy and strength to destroy it, simply because from the start we’ve considered it an enemy lying in wait for us, who ambushed the
Condor
first and then ourselves? How many weird phenomena alien to human concepts are harbored by the universe? Should we land everywhere with weapons of annihilation aboard, in order to smash to smithereens all that surpasses man’s power of comprehension? What did they call it just now? A necrosphere. Which means necro-evolution as well. Development of inorganic matter. Perhaps the inhabitants of the Lyre system might have put in a word or two about that; Regis III belonged to their realm. Maybe they intended to settle here on this planet; once their astrophysicists announced that their sun would turn into a nova, it might have been their last hope. If we ever found ourselves in such a situation, of course we would fight and try to stamp out the black crystal brood. But under the present circumstances? One parsec away from the space station, and the station removed from Earth by so many light years… For whose sake are we sitting here in this damned spot losing our men? Why must the scientists search all night for the best method of annihilation? How can anyone speak of vengeance here?

If only Horpach stood in front of him now, he would tell him all that. How foolhardy, how ludicrous this “victory at any price,” this “heroic persistence of man,” this obsession with retaliation for the death of their companions, who had perished only because they themselves had sent them to their death… We were simply not cautious enough, we relied too much on our powerful weapons. We made mistakes, and now we must take the consequences. We and no one else are responsible.

These were his thoughts in the dimly lit room as he lay on his cot, his eyes burning as if sand had accumulated under his closed eyelids. Man—he saw in a flash of insight—had not yet reached the true pinnacle; he had not yet appropriated that galactocentric idea, praised since antiquity, whose real meaning could not consist in searching only for similar beings and learning to understand them, but rather in refraining from interfering with alien, nonhuman affairs. Conquer the void, of course; why not? But don’t attack what already is, that which in the course of millions of years has achieved a balanced existence of its own, independent, not subject to anyone or anything, except the forces of radiation and matter—an active existence, neither better nor worse than the existence of the amino-acid compounds we call animals or human beings.

Rohan reveled in this noble thought, was filled with understanding for any form of existence, when he was suddenly hit by a sound, sharp as an arrow: the unnerving high-pitched howling of the alarm sirens.

All his thoughts vanished instantly, as if blown away by the blatant noise which spread throughout all the level. He jumped up and rushed out into the corridor, running with the other men with warm, human breath in a heavy, tired trot. But even before he reached the elevator, he felt a blow. Not with any particular organ of sense: indeed, not with his own body at all, but rather as if it were with the spaceship’s body of which he was an infinite particle. Though very distant and weak, the blow shook the
Invincible’s
hull from one end to the other. It was a jolt of immense severity, which—and he felt this too—was received and skillfully warded off by something far bigger than the
Invincible.

“It’s the Cyclops! The Cyclops did it!” yelled the men as they raced ahead. One after the other disappeared in the elevator, whose doors shut with a hissing sound. Other members of the crew stormed noisily down the circular stairway, too impatient to wait their turn at the elevator. At this moment, the silent but even more violent detonation of the second blow bored through the babble of voices, the shouts, the whistles of the crewmen, the nonstop howling of the alarm sirens, through the hasty shuffle of feet coming from the upper levels. The little blue lamps on the corridor ceilings began to flicker, then burned brightly again.

Rohan would never have believed that an elevator could be so slow. He did not even notice that he was still pushing the button with all his might. Only one man still stood beside him, Liwin, the cyberneticist. The elevator stopped, and as Rohan got off he heard a whistling sound, so fine that it was almost unbelievable. He knew that the highest frequencies of this sound could not be perceived by the human ear. It was as if all the titanium joints of the spacecruiser were moaning at the same time. Rohan reached the door to the command center and realized that the
Invincible
had answered fire with fire. That effectively ended the battle.

Before the flaming background of the videoscreen loomed up the tall dark figure of the astrogator. The ceiling lights had been switched off, perhaps on purpose, and through the lines that rippled over the screen from top to bottom, causing the entire visual field to grow hazy, there glistened a gigantic, bulging mushroom, its stem attached to the ground, its huge billowing blisters extending into all four corners of the sky. It seemed motionless. The explosion had annihilated the Cyclops, reduced it to its very atoms, and left a terrible trembling in the air, through which the monotonous voice of the technician could be heard: “Twenty dash six hundred at zero point. Nine dash eight hundred at the circumference. One dash four twenty two in the field.”

1420 Roentgen in the field, pondered Rohan—that means that the radiation has broken through the barrier of the force field. He had not known it was possible. But when he glanced at the dial of the main output meter he saw how powerful a charge the astrogator had applied, enough energy to bring a good-sized inland sea to the boiling point. Well, Horpach hadn’t wanted to risk any further shooting matches. Perhaps he had gone a bit too far here; however, they now had to face only one adversary again.

Meanwhile an extraordinary spectacle unfolded on the picture screens: the ruffled, cauliflower-like mushroom cap was ablaze with all the colors of the rainbow, from the most delicate silvery green to rich orange and carmine red shades. Suddenly Rohan became aware that the desert was no longer visible. It was covered by a dense fog-like bank of sand that had been whirled up to a height of several dozen yards, surging and heaving, as if the desert had become an ocean.

The technician was still calling out the readings on the dial: “Nineteen thousand at zero point. Eight dash six hundred at the circumference. One dash one zero two in the field.”

The victory over the Cyclops was received with a dull silence: to have defeated their own strongest weapon was a hollow triumph. Gradually the men dispersed while the mushroom cloud rose higher and higher into the atmosphere. Suddenly its top flared up in a new color display, as it was hit by the rays of the sun that had not yet risen over the horizon. The peak of the mushroom cap had pierced the upper strata of the icy cirrus clouds and now displayed, high up in the sky, golden lilac, amber yellow and platinum white nuances, whose light was reflected from the videoscreens into the darkness of the command center. The entire room was faintly illuminated by an iridescent glow, as if someone had pulverized colorful terrestrial flowers on the enameled white of the instrument panels.

Once more Rohan felt amazement, this time at Horpach’s appearance. The astrogator had thrown over his shoulders the snow-white dress overcoat which he had last worn during the farewell festivities in the space station. Evidently he had grabbed the nearest article of clothing at hand as he had hurriedly rushed out of his cabin. There he stood, hands in pockets, with gray disheveled hair, letting his gaze wander around the circle of men assembled in the command center.

“Rohan,” he said in an unexpectedly soft voice. “Will you come with me, please.”

Rohan stepped closer, automatically pulling himself up as he did so. The astrogator turned around and walked over to the door. They strode down the corridor, one after the other, and through the ventilation shaft they could hear above the soft hiss of compressed air a dull murmur, the irritated voices of the men on the lower levels.

Rohan had not felt any surprise at the astrogator’s invitation. He entered the commander’s cabin. Rohan was not a frequent visitor to the cabin, but Horpach had summoned him aboard the
Invincible
and received him here after his lonely return to the crater. Such an invitation usually meant something unpleasant. At that time, though, Rohan was still suffering too much from the aftereffects of the catastrophe to fear his commander’s anger. Moreover, Horpach had not blamed him at all, but had interrogated him quite thoroughly as to the circumstances surrounding the cloud’s attack. Dr. Sax had taken part in the conversation. He had surmised that Rohan had been spared only because he had fallen into a state of stupor which limited the brain’s activity, so that the cloud had assumed him to be wounded and thus rendered harmless. And the driver Jarg, in the neuro-physiologist’s opinion, had been spared merely by accident, since his flight had taken him beyond the area where the attack had occurred. Terner, however, who had tried almost to the very end to defend himself as well as the others by shooting with the laser guns, had acted dutifully according to the rules. This very behavior had been his undoing, paradoxically enough, for his brain had continued to function normally and so drew the cloud’s attention to him. To judge by human standards, the black cloud was blind, of course, and man represented nothing to it but a mobile object like any other, which indicated its presence by the electrical potential of its cerebral cortex. Horpach and the physician had even considered protecting the men by placing them in artificial paralysis with the help of chemical preparations. But Sax thought that the effect would occur too late in case an “electrical camouflage” should be needed, and to send the men out on a mission already in a state of stupor would not be advisable at all. In the end, the entire interrogation showed no positive results. Rohan had the impression that Horpach intended to return to the problem at some future date.

Rohan stopped in the middle of the cabin, which was twice as large as his own. On the wall he saw the microphones for the intercom and the direct hook-up to the command center. Besides that there was no other indication that the spaceship’s commander had been living here for years. Horpach took off his coat. Underneath he was wearing trousers and a net undershirt. The thick, gray hairs of his broad chest poked through the netting. Horpach sat down near the spot where Rohan was still standing. The commander leaned heavily on the table, which was empty except for a small, well-thumbed, leather-bound book. Rohan’s glance wandered from the little unknown book over to the commander, and it seemed to him that he saw Horpach for the first time. Here was an utterly exhausted man who did not even attempt to hide the trembling of his hand as he touched it to his forehead. And suddenly Rohan realized that he did not know this man at all, under whom he had been serving for the past four years. It had never occurred to him to wonder why there were no personal effects in the commander’s cabin, the kind of silly trinkets that men would drag along with them on their trips through the universe, souvenirs of their childhood or their homes. At this moment, Rohan seemed to understand why Horpach owned nothing of the kind, why there were no old photos hanging on the walls, showing the faces of those close to him who had remained behind on Earth. Horpach did not need this sort of thing, for Earth was not what he called home. Perhaps he regretted this fact now for the first time in his life? The powerful shoulders, his strong arms, his solid neck did not reveal his age. Only the skin of his hands was old; it was thick and lay in chapped wrinkles around the joints. The skin there turned white as he spread out his fingers, observing the slight trembling with apparently tranquil, tired interest, as if he were noticing something that previously had been unknown to him. Rohan could not continue to watch. But Horpach bent his head, looked in his eyes and murmured with an embarrassed smile: “Seems I overdid things a bit.”