hear them, boss. I’m scared.”
“How long have we been under weigh? When did we leave Ansa?”
“A week ago, boss, maybe more. You been drunk. Wake up, boss, turn on the light. They’re whispering in the dark, and I’m scared.”
“We must be getting close.”
Return. Go home. First comes madness and then comes death and then comes the spinning outward forever. Turn back, spaceman.
Bodiless whisper out of the thick thrumming dark, sourceless all-pervading susurration, and it mocked, there was the cruel cynical scorn of the outer vastness running up and down the laughing voice. It murmured, it jeered, it ran along nerves with little icy feet and flowed through the brain, it called and gibed and hungered. It warned them to go back, and it knew they wouldn’t and railed its mockery at them for it. Demon whisper, there in the huge cold loneliness, sneering and grinning and waiting.
Donovan sat up and groped for the light switch. “We’re close enough,” he said tonelessly. “We’re in their range now.”
Footsteps racketed in the corridor outside. A sharp rap on his door. “Come in. Come in and enjoy yourself.”
3
Donovan hadn’t found the switch before the door was open and light spilled in from the hallway fluorotubes. Cold white light, a shaft of it picking out Wocha’s monstrous form and throwing grotesque shadows on the walls. Commander Jansky was there, in full uniform, and Ensign Jeanne Scoresby, her aide. The younger girl’s face was white, her eyes enormous, but Jansky wore grimness like an armor.
“All right, Donovan,” she said. “You’ve had your binge, and now the trouble is starting. You didn’t say they were voices.”
“They could be anything,” he answered, climbing out of the bunk and steadying himself with one hand. His head swam a little. The corners of the room were thick with shadow.
Back, spaceman. Turn home, human.
“Delusions?” The man laughed unpleasantly. His face was pale and gaunt, unshaven in the bleak radiance. “When you start going crazy, I imagine you always hear voices.”
There was contempt in the gray eyes that raked him. “Donovan, I put a technician to work on it when the noises began a few hours ago. He recorded them. They’re very faint, and they seem to originate just outside the ear of anyone who hears them, but they’re real enough. Radiations don’t speak in human Anglic with an accent such as I never heard before. Not unless they’re carrier waves for a message. Donovan, who or what is inside the Black Nebula?”
The Ansan’s laugh jarred out again. “Who or what is inside this ship?” he challenged. “Our great human science has no way of making the air vibrate by itself. Maybe there are ghosts, standing invisible just beside us and whispering in our ears.”
“We could detect nothing, no radiations, no energy-fields, nothing but the sounds themselves. I refuse to believe that matter can be set in motion without some kind of physical force being applied.” Jansky clapped a hand to her sidearm. “You know what is waiting for us. You know how they do it.”
“Go ahead. Hypnoprobe me. Lay me out helpless for a week. Or shoot me if you like. You’ll be just as dead whatever you do.”
Her tones were cold and sharp. “Get on your clothes and come up to the bridge.”
He shrugged, picked up his uniform, and began to shuck his pajamas. The women looked away.
Human, go back. You will go mad and die.
Valduma, he thought, with a wrenching deep inside him. Valduma, I’ve returned.
He stepped over to the mirror. The Ansan uniform was a gesture of defiance, and it occurred to him that he should shave if he wore it in front of these Terrans. He ran the electric razor over cheeks and chin, pulled his tunic straight, and turned back. “All right.”
They went out into the hallway. A spaceman went by on some errand. His eyes were strained wide, staring at blankness, and his lips moved. The voices were speaking to him.
“It’s demoralizing the crew,” said Jansky. “It has to stop.”
“Go ahead and stop it,” jeered Donovan. “Aren’t you the representative of the almighty Empire of Sol? Command them in the name of His Majesty to stop.”
“The crew, I mean,” she said impatiently. “They’ve got no business being frightened by a local phenomenon.”
“Any human would be,” answered Donovan. “You are, though you won’t admit it. I am. We can’t help ourselves. It’s instinct.”
“Instinct?” Her clear eyes were a little surprised.
“Sure.” Donovan halted before a viewscreen. Space blazed and roiled against the reaching darkness. “Just look out there. It’s the primeval night, it’s the blind unknown where unimaginable inhuman Powers are abroad. We’re still the old half-ape, crouched over his fire and trembling while the night roars around us. Our lighted, heated, metal-armored ship is still the lonely cave-fire, the hearth with steel and stone laid at the door to keep out the gods. When the Wild Hunt breaks through and shouts at us, we must be frightened, it’s the primitive fear of the dark. It’s part of us.”
She swept on, her cloak a scarlet wing flapping behind her. They took the elevator to the bridge.
Donovan had not watched the Black Nebula grow over the days, swell to a monstrous thing that blotted out half the sky, lightlessness fringed with the cold glory of the stars. Now that the ship was entering its tenuous outer fringes, the heavens on either side were blurring and dimming, and the blackness yawned before. Even the densest nebula is a hard vacuum; but tons upon incredible tons of cosmic dust and gas, reaching planetary and interstellar distances on every hand, will blot out the sky. It was like rushing into an endless, bottomless hole, the ship was falling and falling into the pit of Hell.
“I noticed you never looked bow-wards on the trip,” said Jansky. There was steel in her voice. “Why did you lock yourself in your cabin and drink like a sponge?”
“I was bored,” he replied sullenly.
“You were afraid!” she snapped contemptuously. “You didn’t dare watch the Nebula growing. Something happened the last time you were here which sucked the guts out of you.”
“Didn’t your Intelligence talk to the men who were with me?”
“Yes, of course. None of them would say more than you’ve said. They all wanted us to come here, but blind and unprepared. Well, Mister Donovan, we’re going in!”
The floorplates shook under Wocha’s tread. “You not talk to boss that way,” he rumbled.
“Let be, Wocha,” said Donovan. “It doesn’t matter how she talks.”
He looked ahead, and the old yearning came alive in him, the fear and the memory, but he had not thought that it would shiver with such a strange gladness.
And—who knew? A bargain—
