Into the Sea of Stars Read online

  Richard looked at Ian with a bleary gaze. He had yet to recover from last watch's feast. Ian suspected that he didn't look much better.

  "Why don't you stay here with Stasz, as backup?"

  "Most gentlemanly of you, my dear professor." He winked at Ian and glided up to Shelley's vacated chair.

  Ian pushed off for the open hatchway. As he cleared the doorway he heard a muffled comment and, looking back, saw Richard pass his flask to Stasz.

  "For God sake, we're going out to risk our asses and you're soaking it up in here."

  Stasz gave a quick smile to Ian, took a pull on the straw, and floated the flask back to its owner.

  "Steadies me nerves, it does," he said with an absurd brogue.

  "If you need to go in there and get us out," Ian shouted indignantly, "I don't want a couple of drunks responsible for saving my life."

  "I'm insulted, my overly righteous friend," Richard replied. "This doesn't sound like the comrade of my hap­pier youth. Why, you're becoming too official, Ian Lack-lin."

  With a miffed expression Richard turned away to gaze out at the docking bay, which was lining up in the center of the viewport.

  "Idiots," Ian muttered, and continued aft to join the women.

  "Port seals secured, Ian. You can open it up at your discretion."

  "Right. Stasz, stand by if we need any help." He tried to detect any sign of drunkenness in the pilot's voice, but so far nothing.

  Ian looked back at Ellen and Shelley. "Ready?"

  They floated side by side at the back end of the cham­ber. Shelley, of course, could barely contain her eager­ness. Hell, maybe he should let her pop the door while he hid back there with Ellen. He was almost tempted to do it, but what little male chauvinism he possessed forced him to lead the way.

  "You both have the specs on this unit. Given its found­ing philosophy, if anyone is alive, we should find some interesting results."

  They nodded silently, and he knew that a nightmare image was hovering in Ellen's mind. It floated in his con­sciousness, as well.

  Ian punched up the control panel command and the airlock hatch slid back, revealing the colony's door on the other side. It was lightly pitted by micrometeor im­pacts, but the old Anglo-American writing and instruc­tions were still clearly visible. He double-checked the procedure, took hold of the handles, and braced his feet in the magnetic footholds that Stasz had installed. With one sharp pull, the doorway silently opened and a whoosh of air whistled past him. Instinctively he closed his eyes and braced for another nightmare. Nothing touched him; finally he opened his eyes and looked around.

  The vessel's airlock chamber was empty. Pushing off, Ian and the two women drifted into the narrow room. Ellen turned and fumbled with the hatch mechanism, se­curing the vessel from the outside.

  She gave Ian the go-ahead. Talcing a deep breath, he popped the next door, which opened onto the main dock­ing chamber. The room was dimly lit by translucent panels, and a quick scan told him that the chamber had not been maintained or entered in years.

  The vast majority of light panels were dark, and all were covered with a thin coating of dust.

  "Must be running on automatic," Shelley whispered.

  "If my Old English spelling is good," Ellen interrupted, "I believe that sign over there points us to the main cham­ber."

  Following Ellen's lead, they soon faced a large circular doorway at the end of the corridor.

  "This is the end of the nonrotational shaft," Ian said, "assuming, of course, that the blueprints are correct. We clear this door and then enter the main rotating cylinder. Be careful as you go through, you'll be a hundred and fifty meters up from the floor. If you push off too rapidly, you'll float out into the center and it will be a pain to get you back. Just grab hold of the handrails and start to pull yourself down. Watch how I do it."

  "Tell me, Dr. Lacklin," Ellen interjected with a playful touch of malice, "how much experience have you had doing this sort of thing?"

  "None," he whispered, trying to cover the rush of fear.

  He pulled the door release, and as it started to slide open, he felt a moment of panic. But the hatch slid quietly back and there was a barely perceptible rush of air as the pressure equalized. Ian gulped and pushed out.

  It was stunning; beyond his wildest imaginings... and he was terrified.

  The cylinder stretched on for nearly a kilometer, ver­dant with lush semitropical growth. Broad bands of green alternated with narrow fields of black, through which the reflected images of the stars shone in blazing intensity. Illumination came from the opposite end of the cylinder, where a battery of lights emitted a soft yellow glow that bathed the world in a gentle late-afternoon light. He looked down as he drifted out the doorway and a squeal of terror burst from his lips. He had the sensation of falling and the wild vertigo turned his stomach upside down. The network of handhold cables were all around him and in desperation he snagged hold of one and hung on for dear life.

  Laughing, Shelley came up and grabbed hold alongside of him.

  "Do as you do, Dr. Lacklin," Shelley said teasingly, and she pushed herself off the handhold and drifted over to the stairs that spiraled down along the cylinder wall. He started to follow her.

  Within the first fifty feet he started to detect a faint sense of gravity, but Shelley still continued in a head-down direction, as if diving toward the ground.

  "Not too fast, Shelley," Ian called, as if advising an overzealous child, "it can be deceiving. Gravity will pick up significantly the farther we are from the center of ro­tation."

  He looked straight up and noticed that Ellen was com­ing down feet first, still holding on to the handrailings. He liked the fact that she was frightened; somehow it made his own fear more palatable.

  They passed the fifty-meter marker and now even Shel­ley was feet down and using the steps. She was taking ten steps at a bound, but at least she was slowing down.

  "Ian, look at that."

  Ellen had stopped at the fifty-meter observation plat­form. He suddenly realized that she had followed the right course of action. They all should have observed the sit­uation carefully before barging down to the cylinder floor.

  "What is it?"

  "First off, none of the structures down there seems occupied, they're all overgrown. Second, I've yet to see a person. But third, look up overhead and about halfway down the cylinder."

  Ian leaned his head back and gazed up to where she was pointing. It was a shock to see the greenness directly above them, where a lifetime of conditioning had taught him that the sky should be located. He scanned the distant floor for several minutes before finally locating what she had pointed out.

  "It looks like smoke."

  "Shelley, hold it up for a minute." He looked down and saw that she was continuing on.

  "Shelley!"

  She stopped, looked back up, and tapped the side of her helmet to signal there was something wrong with her transceiver. Ian gestured for her to hold, but she turned and kept on going.

  "She's full of crap," Ellen muttered.

  "I know. Call it youthfulness. Something that you and I, my dear Ellen, have started to leave behind."

  "Maybe you, Doctor."

  "All right, Ellen, all right, let's not get into an argu­ment."

  He fell silent and looked out over the expanse of green that had run riot through the ship. His gaze drifted back up toward the smoke. Was it smoke or condensation vent­ing from a broken pipe? And where were the people? The system was still running, almost the entire ship could be programmed to go on automatic, but certain routine re­pairs definitely required human intervention.

  "Shall we go back up the other way and investigate the smoke?" Ellen ventured.

  "Seems a logical place to start."

  He looked over the railing for Shelley, but she was nowhere in sight.

  "Say, look, Shelley," Ian started, "don't give me that crap about a bad radio. If we get back into the ship and I discover it to be w
orking, I'm going to kick your butt."

  He stopped for a moment. An image of Shelley's back­side flashed in his mind and suddenly, for the first time, it was an appealing backside. Naw, must be the isolation of three months out, Ian thought.

  "Shelley!"

  His voice was suddenly cut off by a loud, piercing scream.

  "Ian!"

  "Shelley, what the hell is going on!"

  "Ian!"

  "Shelley. Shelley, what the hell?"

  There was no response.

  "Ian, down there to the left." Ellen was pointing into the heavy growth, and Ian saw the canopy of brush mov­ing as if something were passing underneath it.

  "Ian, this is Stasz. What the hell is going on? That girl of yours nearly busted my eardrums."

  "I don't know, I just don't know..." His voice tapered off. This is what he had feared from the start. The re­sponsibility so far had been merely to point out a direction or, at worst, to mediate fights between the team members. But in his deepest fears he had dreaded this moment. Someone was in jeopardy and he had to decide. Worse. He had to got into what was obviously a dangerous sit­uation.

  He stood frozen by the railing watching the overgrowth ripple toward the middle of the cylinder. He wished more than anything to be absolved, to suddenly disappear back to his little cubbyhole in the stern of the Discovery where he could hide away with his books and forget.

  "Ian!" Several voices called at once, all cutting in, demanding. Vaguely he looked at Ellen and saw her mouth moving behind her faceplate, shouting at him in exasper­ation.

  "Ian, we're coming over," Stasz said. A grunt of as­sertion surfaced from Richard.

  The words started to form in his throat: "Yes, come over and find her, I'm going back to the ship." But that's not what came out.

  "Stay there, by the time you suit up they'll be gone. Ellen, go back for a stun gun, I'll try to follow."

  He pushed off from the platform, descending the steps in long lazy bounds with each jump landing slightly harder than the one before. He had to be careful not to push off too enthusiastically, otherwise it would be one long jump to the bottom, with an impact at killing velocity. He sud­denly remembered some of the cheap space thrillers he had witnessed on the videos, where strange radiation-laden mutants preyed on extraordinarily buxom young nubiles. He actually chuckled at the thought. Shelley was flat-chested, acned, skinny, and bespectacled—he had never seen a monster eat anyone like that before.

  What the hell was he laughing at? Maybe that crap was true after all. Ian reached the bottom of the stairs and was confronted by a wild tangle of growth. A virtual jungle canopied the living units and turned the designed green-spaces into nearly impenetrable wildernesses. Ian rec­ognized the plant as a variation of the kudzo, which still flourished in the south and had been used aboard the colonies as a quick-growing greenery and food source.

  He soon found a number of broken branches, then another broken branch, ten feet farther on. There ap­peared to be a tunnel. He surveyed it cautiously for sev­eral long minutes, and even as he looked at it, he suddenly realized that the cylinder was getting darker.

  "Ellen, are you still up there?"

  "No, I'm back in the ship getting the stun gun. Stasz will be coming back with me."

  "The lights are shutting down." He felt a chill. His mind raced over the fact and then the obvious answer came to him. Even here, a thousand years out, the old custom of day and night remained. The unit's artificial sun was shutting down. Well, if he was going to find Shel­ley, he had to push on.

  Taking a deep breath, he started into the tunnel. "I'm entering a tunnel about fifty feet from the base of the stairs. It seems to run along a walkway now overgrown, you'll see the broken branches."

  He broke into a slow run, but within a hundred yards he had overtaxed the cooling system of his suit and his own body.

  Hell, why am I wearing his pressure cooker? Those plants are oxygen producers, I should crack the helmet.

  But the old Ian was still very much alive—he kept the helmet on while contemplating the toxic trace elements that could have filtered into the closed environment.

  After several more minutes the twilight seemed to darken appreciably, and against his better judgment Ian turned on his helmet light to follow the trail. He knew that it was a clear beacon of warning, but he wasn't up to crawling through the dark.

  He passed a spidery walk that gently arched over a complex of glass-walled buildings, all of them covered by the everpresent kudzo. He estimated that he was nearing the center of the cylinder.

  He stopped for a moment to look back through a break in the canopy of foliage. The far cylinder wall was visible, and he saw twin specks of light suddenly appear against it.

  "Ellen? Stasz? I think I can see you."

  "Ian, where are you?"

  "About halfway into the cylinder."

  "I'm facing you right now, you should be able to see my helmet light."

  From atop their high perch, Stasz suddenly saw the flicker of light, a long way off.

  "I think I see you, Ian. Say, Ian, I see something else. It looks like a fire, can't be more than a couple of hundred meters beyond you."

  There was no response.

  "Ian. Ian?"

  He looked at Ellen.

  "His light just disappeared," Ellen whispered.

  "Oh, shit."

  "Holy shit," Ian whispered.

  The club was poised alongside his head. The semiclad woman holding it had already convinced him of the need to remove his helmet by her vigorous hand motions and waves of the knotted cudgel. He took a deep breath of the clean-smelling air. Why the hell had he kept that damn helmet on anyhow?

  "What do you say?" the woman asked softly, and as she spoke several of her companions came out of the shadows.

  Ian sifted through her speech pattern. It seemed to be based on Old English, to be sure, actually Old American, to be more precise. As his mind searched for the right words, his thoughts calmed down. He was engaged in an academic problem and when lost to such efforts, all else was forgotten.

  "Oly hit?" the woman asked questioningly.

  "No, holy shit," Ian repeated slowly.

  "Shit is not holy, only the light is holy; you must be crazy." The others around her chuckled.

  "Yeah, I think I am for even being here," Ian replied.

  "What you say?"

  "Never mind."

  "Are you of the Dissenters?" a lanky, graying man asked, stepping from out of the. shadows.

  "What the hell are Dissenters?" Ian replied.

  "He must be crazy," a heavy set man next to the graying one interjected.

  "You dressed like that loud-mouthed girl. She of your circle?" the woman asked.

  "Yeah, ahh, yeah, the girl, she's of my circle."

  "Tell me, friend, do you accept the concept that indi­vidual meditation must occur within a collective body?" the gray one asked. "Or do you accept the right of dissent from the collective?"

  Think quick, Ian, he thought frantically. However, he instinctively realized that twenty years of academic com­bat and bullshitting had put him in good stead. Ian noticed how the graying one said dissent with a note of venom. He also realized that the gray man held a very big club.

  "What say you, friend?" the heavyset one asked softly, and he slowly hefted his club.

  "Of course, what other way is there?" Ian blurted. "The individual must always be a part within the collective body." He prayed that he got his words correct; most of the Old American was familiar, but occasional colloqui­alism and, of course, the slang could be deadly. Especially now, so he tried to speak with rigid preciseness.

  He could sense them relaxing.

  "Come, friend, and sit with us in the circle of under­standing." The woman beckoned for him to follow.

  She looked at him with a soft glow, and he suddenly realized how attractive she was in a wild, primitive way. She was almost completely naked except for a brief loin­cloth that
barely covered her broad, inviting hips. He couldn't help but admire her full, rounded breasts, which were partially concealed by her flowing red hair. She no­ticed his stare and smiled back at him with a seductive gaze. For the moment thoughts of rescue drifted away.

  Primitives, he thought, looking for all the world like Neolithic tribesmen or something out of Eden. Yes, it could be Eden: the lush growth, the warm semitropical air, and now that the helmet was off, the sounds of birds and night creatures stirring around him.

  Following the lead of the woman, they pushed their way into a small clearing, illuminated by a roaring blaze. Several dozen figures sat around the crackling flame, and one of them was Shelley.

  He couldn't help but look at the redhead, even as he tried to get his thoughts under control. Shelley turned as one of the people by the fire pointed at the new arrivals.

  "Shelley, everything, all right?"

  "Ian? Well, if it isn't Dr. Lacklin, who's finally come to rescue me."

  Was she mocking him, or was there a slight tone of relief in her voice?

  Ian stepped into the circle of light and, gazing around, saw that dozens more had gathered around in curiosity.

  He drifted over to Shelley's side, smiling broadly and nervously all the while, noticing that they smiled back just as broadly. Good lord, why are they smiling like such damn fools at a total stranger?

  "Dinner." Someone was poking him in the back.

  He turned with a yelp and was confronted by an old man bent over with age.

  "Dinner," the man said again.

  Good lord, was that why they were smiling? They were going to have them for dinner.

  "Shelley!"

  "It's okay, Ian, the food's not bad. Some sort of veg­etarian mix, that's all."

  He finally understood and broke into a nervous grin. "Thank you, ahh, friend."

  A number of people around the circle mumbled their approval at his comment.

  He drew closer to Shelley and sat down by her side. "What happened?"