system. I told them so, but they were men at war. They were desperate men.
We were losing then.”
“We never did win, really,” Gary told her.
“They condemned me to space,” she said. “They put me in that shell you
found me in and a war cruiser towed it out to Pluto’s orbit and cut it
loose. It was an old condemned craft, its machinery outmoded. They ripped
out the rockets and turned it into a prison for me.”
She made a gesture of silence at the shocked look on their faces.
“The histories don’t tell that part of it,” said Herb.
“They probably suppressed it,” she said. “Men at war will do things that no
sane man will do. They would not admit in peace the atrocities that they
committed in the time of battle. They put the laboratory in the control
room as a final ironic jest. So I could carry out my research, they said.
Research, they told me, I’d not need to turn over to them.”
“Would your discovery have wrecked the system?”
Gary asked.
“Yes,” she said, “it would have. That’s why I refused to give it to the
military board. For that they called me traitor. I think they hoped to
break me. I think they thought up to the very last that, faced with exile
in space, I would finally crack and give it to them.”
“When you didn’t,” Herb said, “they couldn’t back down. They couldn’t
afford to let you call their bluff.”
“They never found your notes,” said Gary.
She tapped her forehead with a slender finger. “My notes were here,” she
said.
He looked amazed.
“And still are,” she said.
“But how did you get the drugs to carry out your suspended animation?” Gary
asked.
She waited for long minutes.
“That’s the part I hate to think about,” she said. “The part that’s hard to
think about. I worked with a young man. About my age, then. He must be dead
these many years.”
She stopped and Gary could see that she was trying to marshal in her mind
what next to say.
“We were in love,” she said. “Together we discovered the suspended
animation process. We had worked on it secretly for months and were ready
to announce it when I was taken before the military tribunal. They never
let me see him after that. I was allowed no visitors.
“Out in space, after the war cruiser left, I almost went insane. I invented
all sorts of tasks to do. I arranged and rearranged my chemicals and
apparatus and then one day I found the drugs, skillfully hidden in a box of
chemicals. Only one person in the world besides myself knew about them. I
found the drugs and two hypodermic syringes.”
Gary’s pipe had gone out and now he relit it. The girl went on.
“I knew it would be a gamble,” she said. “I knew he intended that I should
take that gamble. Maybe he had a wild scheme of coming out and hunting for
me. Maybe something happened and he couldn’t come. Maybe he tried and
failed. Maybe the war… got him. But he had given me a chance, a desperate
chance to beat the fate the military court had set for me. I removed the
steel partition in the engine room to make the tank. That took many weeks.
I etched the copper plate. I went outside on the shell and etched the lines
beside the lock. I’m afraid that wasn’t a very good job.”
“And then,” said Herb, “you put yourself to sleep.”
“Not exactly sleep,” she said. “Because my brain still worked. I thought
and thought for almost a thousand years. My mind set up problems and worked
them out. I developed a flair for pure deduction, since my mind was the
only thing left for me to work with. I believe I even developed telepathic
powers.”
“You mean,” asked Herb, “that you can read our thoughts?”
She nodded, then hastened on. “But I wouldn’t,” she said. “I wouldn’t do
that to my friends. I knew when Gary first came to the shell. I read the
wonder and amazement in his thoughts. I was so afraid he’d go away and
leave me alone again. I tried to talk to him with my thoughts, but he was
so upset that he couldn’t understand.”
Gary shook his head. “Anyone would have been upset,” he said.
“But,” exploded Herb, “think of the chances that you took. It was just pure
luck we found you. Your drug wouldn’t have held up forever. Another few
thousand years, perhaps, but scarcely longer than that. Then there would be
the chance that the atmosphere generators might have failed. Or that a big
meteor, or even a small one, for that matter, might have come along. There
were a thousand things that could have happened.”
She agreed with him. “It was a long chance. I knew it was. But there was no
other way. I could have just sat still and done nothing or gone crazy,
grown old and died in loneliness.”
She was silent for a moment.
“It would have been easy,” she said then, “if I hadn’t made that one
mistake.”
“Weren’t you frightened?” Gary asked.
Her eyes widened slightly and she nodded.
“I heard voices,” she said. “Voices coming out of space, out of the void
that lies between the galaxies. Things talking over many light-years with
one another. Things to which the human race, intellectually, would appear
mere insects. At first I was frightened, frightened at the things they
said, at the horrible hints I sensed in the things I couldn’t understand.
Then, growing desperate, I tried to talk back to them, tried to attract
their attention. I wasn’t afraid of them any more and I thought that they
might help. I didn’t care much what happened any more just so someone, or
something, would help me. Even take notice of me. Anything to let me know
that I wasn’t all alone.”
Gary lit his pipe again and silence fell for just a space. “Voices,” said
Herb.
They all stared out at that darkness that hemmed them in. Gary felt the
hairs bristle at the nape of his neck. Some cold wind from far away had
brushed against his face, an unnamable terror out of the cosmos reaching
out for him, searching for him with dirty-taloned thoughts. Things that
hurled pure thought across the deserts of emptiness that lay between the
galaxies.
“Tell me,” said Caroline, and her voice, too, seemed to come from far away,
“how did the war come out?”
“The war?” asked Gary. Then he understood.
“Oh, the war,” he said. “Why, Earth and Mars finally won out. Or so the
histories claim. There was a battle out near Ganymede and both fleets
limped home badly beaten up. The Jovians went back to Jupiter, the
Earth-Mars fleet pulled into Sandebar on Mars. For months the two inner
planets built up their fleets and strengthened home defenses. But the
Jovians never came out again and our fleets didn’t dare carry the war to
the enemy. Even today we haven’t developed a ship that dares go into
Jupiter’s atmosphere. Our geosectors might take us there and bring us back,
but you can’t use them near a planetary body. They work on the principle of
warping space…”
“Warping space?” asked the girl, suddenly sitting upright.
“Sure,” said Gary. “Anything peculiar about it?” “No,” she said, “I don’t
suppose there is.”
Then: “I wouldn’t exactly call that a victory.”
“That’s what the histories call it.” Gary shrugged. “They claim we run the
Jovians to cover and they’ve been afraid to come out ever since. Earth and
Mars have taken over Jupiter’s moons and colonized them, but to this day no
one has sighted a Jovian or a Jovian ship. Not since that day back in 5980.
“It’s just one of them things,” Herb decided for them.
The girl was staring out at space again. Hungry for seeing, hungry for
living, but with the scars of awful memories etched into her brain.
Gary shivered to himself. Alone, she had taken her gamble and had won. Won
against time and space and the brutality of man and the great indifference
of the mighty sweep of stars.
What had she thought of during those long years? What problems had she
solved? What kind of a person could she be, with her twenty-year-old body
and her thousand-year-old brain?
Gary nursed the hot bowl of his pipe between his hands, studying the
outline of her head against the vision-plate. Square chin, high forehead,
the braided strands wrapped around her head.
What was she thinking now? Of that lover who now would be forgotten dust?
Of how he might have tried to find her, of how he might have searched
through space and failed? Or was she thinking of the voices… the voice
talking back and forth across the gulfs of empty space?
The spacewriter, sitting in its own dark corner, broke into a gibbering