phoenix i belled out smoothly in the region of a g-type star. there was a bright flare as a few random hydrogen atoms were destroyed by the ship's sudden appearance. one moment space had been empty except for the few drifting atoms, and the next—the ship was there, squat and ugly.
inside, a bell chimed sweetly, signalling the return to a universe of mass and gravitation and a limiting velocity called c. colonel richard harkins glanced briefly out his forward port, and saw no more than he had expected to see.
at this distance the g-type star was no brighter or yellower than many another he had seen. for a man it might have been hard to tell which star it was. but the ship knew.
within one of the ungainly bulges that sprouted along the length of phoenix i, a score of instruments mindlessly swung to focus their receptors on the nearest body of star-mass.
harkins leaned contentedly back in the padded control seat and watched while the needles gradually found their final position on dials. a few scattered lights bloomed on the console ahead of him. he grunted once with satisfaction as the thermoneedle steadied at 6,000° c. after that he was silent.
he leaned forward and flipped up two switches, and a faint sound of a woodpecker came into the control room as the spectrograph punched its data on a tape. the end of the tape began to come out of a slot. harkins tore it off when the spectrograph was finished with it, threaded it on the feeder spool of the ship's calculator, and inserted the free end in the input slot.
the calculator blinked once at him, as if surprised, and spat out a little card with the single word sol neatly printed in the center.
harkins whistled softly to himself, happily. i had a true wife but i left her, he whistled. old song. old when he first heard it. had a true....
he wondered vaguely what a "wife" was, but decided it probably didn't matter. had a true wife but i left her, he whistled.
he was glad to be home.
the direction finder gave him a fix on earth and he tried to isolate the unimportant star from the others in the same general direction, but he couldn't do it, visually. the ship would do it, though, he wasn't worried about that. he wished he could use the skipdrive to get a little closer. it would take a long time to get in close on the atomic rockets. several days, maybe.
well, he had to do it. the skipdrive wasn't dependable in mass-space. you couldn't tell what it was going to do when you got it too close to a large mass. he'd have to go in on the chemical.
mass-space, he thought. molasses-space, i call it.
too slow, everything too slow, that was the trouble.
reluctantly he switched off the skipdrive's complacent purr. the sudden lack of noise in the cabin made him squint his eyes, and he thought he was going to get a headache for some reason. abruptly, all the cabin furniture seemed very harsh and angular, distorted in some strange way so as to be distinctly irritating to him. he brushed his foot across the deck and the sound of his boot was rasping and annoying.
he didn't like this space much. it wasn't soft, it wasn't restful, it was all full of clutter and junk. he grimaced with distaste at the suddenly ugly console.
he looked down at the floor, frowning, pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger, flirting with the idea of turning the drive back on.
but for some reason he couldn't quite think of at the moment, he couldn't do that. he frowned more severely, but it didn't help; he still couldn't think of the reason he couldn't do it. that headache was coming on strong, now. he'd have to take something for it.
well, well, he thought resignedly. home again, home again.
he was sure he was glad to be home.
home is the hunter, home from something something....
he couldn't remember any of the rest. what the hell was a hunter, anyway? they irritated him, these nonsense songs. he didn't know why he kept thinking about them. hunters and wifes. nonsense. babble.
he keyed the directional instruments into the course-control and armed the starting charge for the chemical motors. when he had checked everything carefully, as he had been taught, he strapped himself into the control chair with his hand on the arm-rest over the firing button. he knew it was going to hurt him.
he fired, and it did hurt him, the sense of explosive pressure, the abrupt thundering vibration. it was not the same as the soft, enfolding purr of the skipdrive, comforting, assuring, loving....
what's that? loving?
a wife is a martha, he thought. a martha is a wife.
it seemed to mean something, but he didn't have time to decipher it before he passed out.
when he came to he immediately switched off the chemical drive. it had given him a good shove in the right direction, and that was all that was necessary. he would coast in now, and he had to save his fuel for maneuvering in atmosphere.
after that, he rested, trying to accustom himself to the harshness of things in mass-space.
his time-to-destination indicator gave him ten hours, when he began to feel uneasy. he couldn't pin-point the source of unease at first. he was fidgety, impatient. or something that resembled those feelings. it was like when he couldn't remember why he wasn't supposed to turn the skipdrive back on. it occurred to him that he wasn't thinking clearly, somehow.
he noticed to his surprise he had switched on his transmitter. probably while he was drumming his fingers or something. he switched it off.
thirty minutes later he found himself toying with the same switch. he had turned it on again. this was getting ridiculous. he shouldn't be so nervous.
he grinned wryly to himself. the transmitter switch, indeed. if ever a useless piece of junk had been put in phoenix i, that was it. transmitter switch!
he laughed aloud. and left the switch open.
he found himself staring with fascination at the microphone. it was pretty interesting, he had to admit that. it was mounted on the back of the control chair, on swivel arms. it could easily be pulled into position right in front of his face. just as if it had been meant to. he fiddled with it interestedly, swinging it back and forth, seeing how it moved on the swivel arms.
he was interested in the way it moved so smoothly, that was all. by coincidence, when he let go of it, it was directly in front of him.
there was something picking at him, something was nagging at the back of his mind. he whistled under his breath and knuckled his eyes. he scrubbed at the top of his head with his right hand, as if he could rub the annoying thought. suddenly he heard his own voice saying:
"earth control, this is phoenix i. come in please."
he looked up, startled. now why would he say a thing like that?
and then, in the midst of his surprise, he repeated it!
"earth control, this is phoenix i. come in please."
he flipped the receive switch without volition. his hands had suddenly developed a life of their own. he began to breathe more rapidly, and his forehead felt cool. he swallowed twice, quickly.
there was no answer on the receiver.
no what? answer? what is "answer"?
"estimate arrival four hundred seventy-two minutes," he said loudly, looking at the time-to-destination indicator.
there was a sudden flood of relief, washing away the irritation that had been picking away at the back of his mind. he felt at ease again. he turned off both transmitter and receiver and stood out of the control chair. he felt better now, but he was a little worried about what had happened.
he couldn't understand it. suddenly he had lost control of himself, of his voice and his hands. he was doing meaningless things, saying things, making motions stupidly. every movement he made, every act, was without pattern or sense.
he had a sudden thought, and it made his whole body grow cold and prickly, and he almost choked.
maybe i'm going nova.
he was near the edge of panic for a minute. nova nova nova nova.
brightly flaring, burning out, lighting space around for billions of light years....
that was how it started, he knew. unpredictability, variation without explanation.... he sat back down in the control chair, feeling shaky and weak and frightened.
by the time he had regained his balance, time-to-destination told him 453 minutes.
he guided phoenix i into an orbit around earth. he circled three times, braking steadily with his forward rockets until he entered atmosphere.
on his fifth pass he spotted his landing place. how he knew, he didn't quite understand, but he knew it when he saw it. there was a sense of satisfaction somewhere in him that told him, "that's it. that's the right place."
each succeeding pass was lower and slower, until finally he was maneuvering the ungainly bulk of the ship like a plane, wholly in atmosphere.
like a what?
but he was too busy to worry about it. fighting the phoenix i down in atmosphere required all his attention. absently he noted the amazingly regular formations of rock surrounding his landing place.
his hands flew over the console automatically, a skilled performer playing a well-learned fugue without conscious attention to detail. the overall pattern was clear in his mind, and he knew with absolute confidence he could depend on his hands to take care of the necessary small motions that went to make up the large pattern.
he did not think: upper left button third from end right bank rockets three-quarters correct deviation.
he thought: straight. and his hand darted out.
the ground was near below him, now. he could see parts of the landscape through the port, wavering uncertainly in the heat waves from his landing blast.
slower ... slower ... slower.... the roar was reflected loud off the flat below....
touch.
perfect, he thought happily. perfect perfect perfect.
he leaned contentedly back in the control chair and watched the needles of the console gauges fall lifeless back to the pins.
he whistled a little tune under his breath and smiled.
now what?
get out.
he couldn't think of the reason for it, but he would do it. while he waited for the hull to cool, he dropped the exit ladder, listened to the whine of the servomotors.
he opened the port and stood at the edge, looking out. his headache had come back again, worse than ever, and he grimaced at the sudden pain.
before him stretched the flat black plane of the landing pad, ending abruptly in the regular formations he had noted before. they were mostly white, and contrasted strongly with the black of the pad. they weren't, he realized, rock formations at all, they were—
they were—buildings, they—
his mind shied away from the thought.
it was silent. his headache seemed to be affecting his vision, somehow. either that or the landing pad wasn't cool yet. when he looked toward the—toward the white formations at the edge of the pad, they seemed to waver slightly near the ground. heat waves still, he decided.
nimbly, and with a pleasant sense of being home again, he scrambled down the ladder and stood on the ground, tiny beneath the clumsy shape of phoenix i.
about halfway between the edge of the pad and his ship stood a tiny cluster of thin, upright poles. from their bases he could see black, snakelike cables twisting off toward the edge, shifting in his uncertain vision. he walked toward them.
the silence was so complete it was unnatural. it was almost as if his ears were plugged, rather than the simple absence of sound. well, he supposed that was natural, after all. he had lived with the buzzing purr of the skipdrive and the thunder of the rockets so long, any silence would seem abnormal.
as he drew closer to the upright rods, he saw each one was topped with a bulge, a vaguely familiar....
they were microphones! they were just like the microphone in phoenix i, the one he had fooled with.
he was sincerely puzzled. all that transmit-receive gadgetry in the ship had been foolish, but what was he to think of finding it here on his landing pad? it didn't make any sense. he was getting the uneasy sense of confusion again. the headache was becoming almost unbearable.
he walked over to the cluster of microphones. that was probably the place to start. he took the neck of one in his hand and pulled it, but it didn't move smoothly, as the one on his control chair had. it simply tipped awkwardly toward him.
suddenly he felt something on his shoulder, and looked around quickly, but could see nothing. the pressure on his shoulder remained, and he vaguely brushed at it with his hand. it went away.
he set the microphone back upright and looked back at his ship. there was another pressure on his opposite shoulder, sudden and harder than the first had been. he slapped at it, and stepped back, uncertainly.
one of the microphones tipped toward him, but he hadn't touched it. he took another step backwards, and felt something close tightly around his left arm. he snapped his head to the left, but there was nothing there.
he twisted sharply away to the right, and the motion freed him, but his shoulder hit something solid. he gasped, and his throat tightened again. he raised his hand to his head. the headache was getting worse all the time.
something touched him on the back.
he spun, crouching.
nothing.
he stood straight again, his eyes wide, panting from the fear that was beginning to choke him. his fists clenched and unclenched as he tried to puzzle out what was happening to him.
the air closed abruptly around both arms simultaneously, gripping so tightly it hurt.
he shouted and twisted loose and started to run back toward the ship. he stumbled against an invisible something, fell against another, but it kept him upright and prevented his falling. several times as he ran, things he could not see brushed him, touched him on the shoulders and back.
by the time he scrambled up the ladder, his breath was short, and coming in little whimpers. the headache was the greatest pain he thought he could ever have known, and he wondered if he were dying.
he had to kick at invisible things that clutched at his feet on the ladder, and when he reached the edge of the port he stood kicking and flailing at nothing until he was certain none of the—creatures, things were there.
he shut the port swiftly and ran breathlessly up to the control room. he threw himself into the padded chair.
finally he lowered his head into his hands and began to weep.
