They lay satiated and languid, among their crumpled clothes, bodies steaming moistly with fulfilled love. Eleanor stretched her bare arm to collect what remained of her cigarette. She brought it to her lips, close to Benteley’s face, and breathed the oddly sweet scent of sexual satisfaction into his eyes, and nose, and mouth.
“Ted,” she whispered presently, “I’m enough for you, aren’t I?” She pulled herself up a trifle, a flow of muscles and flesh. “I know I’m sort of . . . small.”
“You’re fine,” he said vaguely.
“There isn’t anybody you remember you’d rather be with?” When there was no answer, she went on, “I mean, perhaps I’m not really much good at it, am I?”
“Sure. You’re swell.” His voice was empty, toneless. He lay against her inert and lifeless. “Just right.”
_”Then what’s wrong?”_
“Nothing,” Benteley said. He struggled to his feet and moved dully away from her. “I’m just tired. I think I’ll turn in.” His voice gained sudden harshness. “As you. said, tomorrow should be a big day.”
NINE
LEON CARTWRIGHT was eating breakfast with Rita O’Neill and Peter Wakeman when the ipvic relay operator notified him that a closed-circuit transmission from the ship had been picked up.
“Sorry,” Captain Groves said, as each faced the other across billions of miles of space. “I see it’s morning there. You’re still wearing your old blue dressing gown.”
Cartwright’s face was pale and haggard. And the image was bad; extreme distance made it waver and fade. “Where exactly are you?” he asked, in a slow, hesitant voice.
“Forty astronomical units out,” Groves answered. Cartwright’s appearance was a shock to him, but he was not certain how much was due to the distortions of long-distance relay transmission. “Well start moving out into uncharted space, soon. I’ve already switched over from the official navigation charts to Preston’s material.”
The ship had gone perhaps halfway. Flame Disc held an orbit of twice the radius vector of Pluto—assuming that it existed. The orbit of the ninth planet marked the limit of charted exploration; beyond it lay an infinite waste about which little was known and much had been conjectured. In a short while the ship would pass the final signal buoys and leave the finite, familiar universe behind.
“A number of the group want to go back,” Groves said. “They realize they’re leaving the known system. This is their last chance to jump ship; if they don’t do it now, they’re stuck to the end.”
“How many would jump if they could?”
“Perhaps ten. Or more.”
“Can you go on without them?”
“We’ll have more food-stuffs and supplies. Konklin and his girl Mary are staying. The old carpenter, Jereti. The Japanese optical workers, our jet stoker … I think we can make it.”
“Let them jump, then, if it won’t jeopardize the ship.”
“When you and I talked before,” Groves said, “I didn’t have a chance to congratulate you.”
Cartwright’s distorted image roused itself wearily. “Congratulate me? All right. Thanks.”
“I wish I could shake your hand, Leon.” Groves held his big dark hand up to the ipvic screen; Cartwright did the same, and their fingers appeared to touch. “Of course, you people there on Earth are used to it, by this time.”
A muscle in Cartwright’s cheek twitched spasmodically. “I have trouble believing it, myself. It seems like a kind of nightmare I can’t wake up from.”
“Nightmare! You mean the assassin?”
“That’s right.” Cartwright grimaced. “He’s supposed to be on his way. I’m sitting here waiting for him to show up.”
When he had concluded the transmission, Groves called Konklin and Mary into the control bubble and briefed them in a few unemotional words. “Cartwright agrees to let them jump ship. That takes care of them; at dinner I’ll make the announcement.”
He indicated a dial that had glowed into life. “See that rusty needle start moving? That’s the first time this indicator has reacted in the whole existence of the ship.”
“It means nothing to me,” Konklin said.
“That irregular pattern is a robot signal; I could slick it over to aud and you’d probably recognize it. That marks the final limit of charted space. No ships go beyond this distance except scientific expeditions making abstract tests.”
“When we claim the Disc,” Mary said, eyes wide, “that marker will be pulled down.”
“The expedition of ’89 found nothing,” Konklin pointed out uneasily. “And they had all Preston’s data, everything he did.”
“Maybe what Preston saw was an extra-large space serpent,” Mary suggested half-humorously, half-wanly. “Maybe it’ll devour us, like in the stories people tell.”
Groves eyed her stonily. “I’ll handle the navigation. You two go and supervise the loading of the lifeboat, so we can get the jumpers off. You’re sleeping down in the hold, aren’t you?”
“Down with everybody else,” Konklin said.
“When the lifeboat’s gone you can probably claim one of the cabins. Most of them will be empty—take any one you want.” Sourly, Groves added: “Most of the ship will be empty, I’m afraid.”
The hold had been the infirmary. The two of them carefully swept and cleaned every surface inch. Mary washed the walls and ceiling, mopped the floor and painstakingly dusted the vent grills. “There’s not so much metallic grit in here,” she said hopefully to Konklin, as she lugged waste debris to the disposal slot.
“This was for the crew.”
“If the ship lands all right, perhaps we could use this for our permanent living quarters. It’s better than I had back on Earth.” Throwing herself wearily down on the little iron cot, she slid off her sandals. “You have a cigarette? Mine are gone.”
Konklin moodily gave her his pack. “That’s the works.”
Lighting up gratefully, Mary leaned back and closed her eyes. “It’s peaceful, here. Nobody standing out in the corridors shouting.”
“Too quiet. I keep thinking of what’s outside. No-man’s land. Between systems. God, the cold! It’s all around us, out there. Coldness, silence, death . . . if not worse.”
“Don’t think about it. We should keep busy.”
“When it comes down to it we’re not such fanatics after all. It seemed like a good idea, a tenth planet for everybody to migrate to. But now that we’re really out here—”
Troubled, Mary asked: “Are you mad at me?”
“I’m mad at all of us. Half the group has already jumped. I’m mad because Groves is sitting up there in the control bubble trying to plot a course on the basis of a madman’s mystic guess instead of accurate scientific data. I’m mad because this ship is a brokendown old ore-carrier, about to burst apart.” He finished, “I’m mad because we’ve passed the last marker and nobody comes this way but visionaries and crackpots.”
“Which are we?” Mary asked, in a small voice.
“We’ll find out, one of these days.”
Mary reached up shyly and took hold of his hand. “Even if we don’t get there, this will be awfully nice.”
“This? This little cell? Like a monk’s cell?”
“I think so.” She gazed up at him earnestly. “This is what I wanted, before. When I was moving around aimlessly, looking everywhere. Going from one person to the next. I didn’t want to be a bed girl . . . but I didn’t really know what I wanted. Now I think I’ve found it. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you—you’ll be mad again. I have a charm I made up to bring you to me. Janet Sibley helped me with it; she’s good at fixing them. I wanted you to love me very much.”
Konklin smiled and leaned down to kiss her.
Abruptly, soundlessly, the girl winked out of existence. A sheet of glaring white flame filled the room around him; there was nothing else, only the cold glittering fire that billowed everywhere, a universe of shimmering incandescence that ate away all shapes and being, that left nothing but its own self.
He pulled back, stumbled, and fell into the lapping sea of light. He wept, cried piteously, tried to creep away, scrabbled and clutched and moaned. He groped futilely for something, anything to hang onto, but there was only the limitless expanse of dazzling phosphorescence.
And then the voice began.
It started deep inside him and bloomed to the surface in a vast rush. The sheer force of it stunned him. He sank down, babbled crazed nonsense, lay in a foetal heap, bewildered and helpless, blasted to limp, inert protoplasm. The voice thundered in him and around him, a world of sound and fire that consumed him completely. He seemed a wad of shriveled-up debris, a seared ruin, cast out by the raging inferno of living energy.
_”Earth ship,”_ the voice said. _”Where are you going? Why are you here?”_
The sound thrilled through Konklin, as he lay helpless, sprawled in the lake of foaming light. The voice ebbed and flowed like the fire itself, a pulsing mass of raw energy that lashed at him relentlessly, within and without.