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Ebook has 77 lines and 6006 words, and 2 pages

Flight Into The Unknown

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!

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.

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!"

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.

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 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.

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.

A wild horse of fright leaped inside Bailey and he wanted to tear off the headset. Above the alarm bell DiCredico was yelling. "Pinhead meteor. No danger. Jones, Alvarez, help Benning. Bulkhead will seal itself, men, it's only a pinhead meteor."

Bailey's ears rang. A tiny, immensely fast meteor had hit, been vaporized, the coagulant between the inner and outer shells had sealed the hole. His spine itched. Did the little one mean they were near a swarm where they might catch a big one?

His answer was a modulated mechanical keening from the proximity teller, up forward.

He glanced at DiCredico for the don-space-suits order, but the captain was floating forward fast and wordlessly. To control himself Bailey gave his attention to the radar. All he heard was the insinuating laughter.

The teller was howling like a hound in hell. DiCredico emerged from the forward compartment, his short bulk ungraceful in the air. "Don suits!" he ordered. "We're in a swarm!"

Matt wrenched off the headset and launched himself toward his suit rack. He scrambled into his suit, dogged down the helmet, and sound and fire burst through the ship.

He was lifted and slammed against a bulkhead. Black fire belched behind his eyes. He had a flashing vision of the backyard of his folks' home in Pittsburg, and a dark curtain fell over it.

When he opened his eyes he saw he was alone among a crew of death. They hung in their spacesuits against the bulkheads like limp grey bats while the ship tore on through space. Two had failed to get their helmets on. Their faces were bruised plums, mottled. Inside their bloated chests, the lungs would be pink froth, literally having exploded with the instant drop in air pressure. A third man's suit had ruptured up the front, the raggedy edges flayed back like skin. The man was swollen like one long drowned.

There was no air. It had rushed through the barrel-sized hole in the hull. There was only one hole--the meteor had burst on impact and not passed clear through. Chunks of stone, ribbons of blood, scraps of metal hung quiet or floated above the deck.

Matt had never told anyone how he felt about space. It was a freezing, heart-killing loneliness that waited icily, and now it had come in through the hull and was with him. His jaw clenched. He had no idea whether he could carry on alone, but he was going to.

Then one of the grey bats stirred, drew up its legs, and launched itself off the bulkhead. The others began to move. A laugh rolled in Bailey's throat. Like him, they had only been stunned.

They froze the encapsulated dead and patched the hole as best they could and found a clock still running and re-set their instruments, and each man had a souvenir piece of meteor stone, and less than two weeks after this was done the boredom dropped over them again as though excitement had never been.

The tension about their mission to Krotzer, tighter from hour to hour only made it worse. They began to hate each other's mannerisms, the way a person scratched an ear or cleared a throat. It's getting you, Bailey, Matt told himself. This way men go nuts.

It was after chow that he did it. He walked over and turned off the television. All kinds of emotions stood on the faces of the others. Rage was the one on the face of a hulking man named Regan.

"It was right at the best place!" growled the big spaceman. "Turn it on!"

Matt placed himself directly before the screen. "Turn it on yourself!" he baited, with a twisted smile he meant to be lightly humorous.

Regan shoved from the wall and floated slowly toward him.

"There's a reason for watching this stuff," one of the crewmen put in, "I tell you we've got to watch it! Turn it back on, son."

Matt laughed. "What a stinker. The Space Service! Glamour! Commentators and books and slogans and kids and girls all talk about it like a hero carnival but it stinks, it's a bunch of guys going nuts on the other side of nowhere and--"

Regan hit him. He flew backward, seeing stars, rolling in the air. DiCredico's voice gonged from the captain's cabin.

"Knock it off! Regan, turn the set on, get back to the entertainment. Bailey, want to see you in here."

It all went out of Bailey and he felt foolish and frightened. He swung into the cabin and floated at attention.

It took DiCredico ten minutes to get through his talk with Bailey, speaking in tough, slicing sentences. The service was no bed of roses, said the skipper, and nobody in the service had ever claimed it was. It was a damned mean racket and nobody asked you to get into it. You volunteered. And you didn't have to stay. Before each voyage you could ask for honorable discharge, or earth duty if available. But once you blasted off, you had to stand the gaff. You had to.

There were men who cracked. There were whole crews. If one man lost control, another might, and finally all of them. Nobody knew how many flights were lost through "mental hazard." There were shrewd guesses.

Bailey could make the Ranger another missing ship. And they weren't on freight nor patrol--they were on a rescue mission. He should think about that.

You had to learn to use the television and the other corny "entertainment"--let it soak you up, take you away for awhile.

He could have Bailey put under dormisol, so he'd sleep through the rest of the trip. But he was needed. But he could request it, and DiCredico would do it.

Bailey did not request it. He went back and shook hands with Regan, who was very decent about it all, and sat down to learn to use the television.

Things were a little better after that.

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