Flight Into The Unknown
By Tom W. Harris
It was Bailey's first trip into space and things began to happen that made him wonder if luck alone would bring him back to Earth alive!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy August 1957 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
... A hand moved ...
Young Bailey fell. It was a terrible sensation, falling. Bailey was not sure how long he had been falling. There was no one near him. They had been scattered like seeds from a burst pod when the meteor hulled the ship. Bailey was falling through the dark alone; he had been falling endlessly.
... Those with him now were all palefaced with fear ...
The voice of Krotzer was still in the headphones: "... closing in on me, I can't describe them, you've got to get here...." Krotzer had meant so much for so long; now his voice was less than nothing. Bailey was falling like a stone; the sensation drove everything else out of him. Bailey could not stand it any longer, and began to scream.
It shattered his visor and icy space rushed in. There was light and his captain was looking at him. Captain DiCredico was shaking him.
Bailey's face was dripping. He grabbed the skipper. "I'm falling! Hold me!"
... Thousands of eyes bulged, hands twitched ...
DiCredico squeezed a plastic bottle, squirting water into his face. Drops spattered and drifted off slowly through the air. Bailey blinked and stared. He was aboard the Ranger. Safe. Then panic came gibbering back at him as his body told him unmistakably he was falling.
"You're not!" snapped DiCredico. "No gravity, remember? Spin ship!" he ordered over his shoulder.
Gently, Bailey's body felt the reassuring tug as centrifugal force duplicated a light gravity and the alarm bells in his nerves and glands stopped ringing. The hull of the ship became "down," and men walked instead of floating—walked on the walls and ceiling, too, like wheel-spokes radiating from the axis of spin.
"Over it?" asked DiCredico.
"I guess so. I'm sorry."
"Happens to all of us. Human body is made with a built-in, full-scale emergency response to falling—and lack of gravity is what triggers it. When you're awake you can consciously control it. I'm going to have to quit spinning ship now—can't take bearings, and this slant-standing can be worse than no gravity."
The substitute gravity faded and Bailey's body tried to panic again, but he reined it in firmly. He went forward to watch television. It was the same canned show he'd seen ten times already. And the canned radio show was one he hadn't liked in the first place. The Service did its best to make a ship a synthetic, miniature Earth—but it couldn't. Ten months already—maybe a year more. Plenty of people blew their stacks. A wonder they all didn't. Would he?
Like black, bad blood, a pulse of fear in Bailey's mind.
... and in those others that were his ...
It was time for his stint on radar. Benning handed him the headset gratefully. "Krotzer's still sending," he said. "Awful to listen to. Whatever they are, they're doing something to his bubble. He thinks they may be in soon. I hope to Christ we get there."
"What do you think they are, anyway?"
"Beats me," Benning answered. "Looks like you'll see some grade-A monsters your first time out, you lucky boy." An unconvincing smile crossed his face, which like all their faces was dead white from months of being away from anything like sunlight. "A lot of lousy things can happen in space. I hope we get less than our share of them."
Bailey snugged the headset over his ears. The voice of Krotzer was weaker. Bailey pictured him crouched in his bubble, his radar broken and only fit for sending, wondering if any lonely ship at all was hearing him, and if it was, if it would arrive in time. Krotzer had a wife, and a child he had never seen.
Now he was talking about the things outside the bubble. "I never saw anything like them. In fact, I can't see them. Can't exactly. You can see them with your feelings, somehow—hooded sort—and beginning to come through...."
He broke off, started again. "This is Captain Krotzer of the Galileo. We have crashed on Katherine Two, satellite of Saturn, continental area. Something has killed five of us. Chan Lee and I are living in the bubble. Cannot receive you on disabled radar. Besieged."
He stopped. The headphones were silent except for the uncanny snickering static of deep space. They sometimes called it "laughter." It was not good for the nerves. It was as though space itself were cackling at them, thought Bailey. Get off that. Think about something else.
He remembered Krotzer well, an expert on extra-terrestrial life, a man with a face mingling sensitivity and courage. He had lectured once at Prelim. Bailey remembered some of it. Almost imperceptible, living crystals that swarmed in the air of one planet. They got into your system, converted your matter, and you suddenly crumbled into a heap of the same kind of crystals. And the unknown life of the planet Caliban, called the Shunned Planet because of some influence that reached out and sucked ships down by doing something to the minds of the men. And the singing smoke droves. And the dissolvers. And others.
... A shudder in the mind of Bailey and the other same minds ...
Krotzer was beginning again: "This is Captain Krotzer of the ..." when there was a blinding white flash and the ship rang like a great bell slammed with a sledge-hammer. A spurt of white-hot blasted into the compartment and Benning, who had been near the bulkhead, cartwheeled with hands to his seared face.
