The Star Mill Read online

  He shrugged. To his right he saw the controls room door open wider under young McGinn's urging boot. All three of them were waiting. Waiting for answers.

  "Well?" Grant's voice had a sharp edge now.

  "Sorry. I can't tell you. I don't know."

  Three assorted involuntary sounds.

  "You mean you can't remember anything?" Grant barked. "Not even your name?"

  "No. Nothing. I was bom on that rock." He brushed his eyes with an angry gesture. "I don't remember a damn thing. Not who I am. Not how I got there. Nothing. My mind is wiped clean." Words tumbled out now. It was some relief to share his torture.

  Captain Grant's sharp eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "But you are human."

  "Human?" Of course he was human! He bridled back in a rush of furious indignation.

  "I am referring to the simulacra we fought during the last years of the Alien Wars. Creatures bred to look and react like humans, manning ships just like ours."

  "I'm human!" he shouted.

  This time the appraisal was longer, more studied.

  "The tests I gave him were all perfect," Brooks put in. "He responded positively to his blood plasma type as well as to the medication."

  "So did the Mockers," Grant said dryly. "However, I believe him." He faced his unwanted guest. "Maybe the trauma of being deserted there on that chunk of bare rock, facing certain death, did snap off part of your mind. Maybe you don't know about Man in Deep Space. How, after rime-skip took us to the stars, we developed a kind of defensive affinity for our own kind, in spite of the attempts by other intelligent races to trick us. I'm not an esper, but I've been a Starman for almost thirty years and I know what is human and isn't. You might say I can smell it." He allowed his wax-tight jaw to relax a little, then tightened it again. "You are one of us. I accept that. But what eke are youV

  The long fingers moved involuntarily to the red scar. Grant's scowl deepened.

  "You were close to the Storm. For days. Weeks. Lord knows how long or where you were before that. We know that to touch even the fringe area of the Black Storm means instantaneous disintegration, but we don't know anything about what long duration that close could do." His gloved hand clenched and struck the map on the table. "We just don't know!"

  The shaggy red head bent down. "You keep talking about the Black Storm—1"

  "He needs briefing," Brooks suggested.

  "Maybe a shot of recent history might trigger his memory," McGinn piped from the open door.

  Captain Grant paced the room with military strides. His apprehension, his distaste, was hidden behind that blank mask, but it was palpable. It crackled the air with every step his polished boots took.

  "Amnesia is a convenience, sometimes self-induced. Our Terran Council has had some fantastic dealings with alien devices. For instance, what if you were put there on that rock after your mind had been deliberately erased? What if we were intended to find you, take you back to Terra with us?"

  Silence, while the significance of the Captain's rhetorical question sank in. He continued:

  "The Black Storm was discovered here at the point-star the ancients called Merak in Ursae Majoris by roving second-generation colonists less than a century ago. How long it has existed and what it is—we can't even guess. Our newest instruments can't probe deep enough into the swirling nebular mass to compute it with any accuracy. All we know is that at the heart of that black chemical mass of radioactivity is something. Something that destroys everything that comes near it. We lost a lot of ships trying to find out what. Starmen are born curious; they can't let well enough alone. We keep losing ships in the Black Storm, year by year. Then there are the cargo ships and private syndicate craft that blunder off course in this frontier area...."

  Captain Grant's grim brooding look as he flicked a glance from Brooks toward McGinn at the controls said: 7 should have prevented the pick-up if I had to knock your heads together, damn me for a blasted fooll

  Brooks thrust in, out of his bookish studies:

  "One theory of the Storm, or Nebula as they call it, for want of specific information, is that it's a radioactive dump. That it was material hauled out into space by some race outside our galaxy and has been drifting deeper into our Milky Way for fight-years. Yet, erratic as it is deadly, it has none of the characteristics of a true nebu--la. Some of our way-out brains go so far as to postulate that the Black Storm is controlledr

  "By—who?"

  "You tell us," Captain Grant snapped. "Maybe it was sent into our galaxy to soften us up before . . ." He barked a dry laugh. "Hell, this is wild! The Terran Fleet has cut a wide swath; there's a lot of nothing between planetary suns, and nowhere have we discovered any hint of the super-super races our imaginative writers dream up. Everything falls right within the Fleet's calculated potential. Even the Mockers were foreseeable."

  Brooks nodded. "Yet the worst feature of the Storm is that it's growihg-and fasti It entraps everything that cuts into its elliptical fringe and reduces it into molecular dust. This dust takes on its characteristic seething menace and expands it. It picks up all manner of space debris, too, barreling along like a black hell-ball." His gray eyes looked at horror. "With all due respect to the Fleet's hands-off policy, something's got to be done about it before long! We have got to probe into its nucleus somehow—or else!"

  The man with the copper beard felt a creeping numbness move up from his magnetic boots to his locked brain. McGinn missed a driving meteorite nest, swerved; the ship lurched when the automatics took over and corrected. The three in the master cabin bent like reeds in a high wind. Captain Grant swore and shouted at the First Mate to keep his eyes on the f ore-vid.

  Captain Grant snapped a look at the copperbeard.

  ^Well?"

  "Sorry. Nothing you've told me helped. I still can't remember a damn thing."

  Grant's lips tightened over a stifled rush of words as he went back to his star-maps behind the table. He didn't look up but his hands shook a little at their work.

  "May I try, sir?" Brooks asked.

  Grant shrugged.

  J*Y°u're one of us"—the mild-mannered scientist opened —"and of course our hearts are close to Terra. Maybe something more close to home will help. For instance, the World Council. The shielded close-security park area centered at what was once Washington, D. C, where the Council holds its sessions and decides all-important Ter-ran Empire questions. Does that ring a bell?"

  "No."

  Except for the extreme Polar areas"—Brooks tried again—"Terra is practically all Cities, numbered Cities, with hundreds of Levels to each City. The Cities are so crowded and similar that the local travel terrans used to indulge in is pointless. And there is a long waiting list for star colonies. X-Plor keeps reaching out further and further in Deep to find habitable planets, but the spaces in between are endless, and usable worlds so pitifully few. Not to mention the incredible expense of getting them there, battling primitives, wedging in a toehold. Still, that's our only hope. The Levels leap higher, or burrow deeper; the lists stretch longer. T.D.S. X-Plors use these 'mosquito' ships for frontier thrusts to conserve fuel for such long pulls. These uncharted stints are hit and miss and"—the sallow face puckered—"starmen don't make very good insurance risks."

  He paused hopefully. Captain Grant kept at his work of charting new area.

  From his post, McGinn chuckled. "It's a short life; time-skip takes it out of a guy. But it's better than being a sardine buried down in the Levels."

  Again that hopeful silence. Nobody looked at the derelict; they just waited for something to develop out of the mental prodding.

  He sighed. "Sorry."

  "Nothing at all?" Brooks asked, with sympathy.

  "Nothing." The red scar flared out under an angry rush of blood. "Why didn't you leave me on that rock? Why take chances?"

  Brooks grinned wryly. "I really don't know. I've only been with Captain Grant seven years and this is Joe's first long pull. How do you explain? Deep Space is so b
ig —so frighteningly impersonal—you develop a kind of reverence for any kind of life. You cherish it. Every scrap of humanity becomes important. Joe and I—we just couldn't leave you there. Captain Grant's gone beyond us, developed a land of defensively reactionary hardness. Joe and I haven't—yet."

  Captain Grant's head snapped up.

  "I am Captain. This ship has been my heart and my soul for fifteen years, and before that another just about like it. We had our little vote, yes. But it meant nothing! Neither did the responsibility release you two dreamed up." His eyes went from Brooks to the derelict. "We were close to the Storm, not to brush the fringe, but too damn close for comfort. The instruments for measuring radioactivity went ape and they are still ape. God knows why! Maybe it was the dip down to your rock or—"

  "Maybe it's me!" He was beyond bitterness by this time. "You should have left me there."

  "Yes!" Captain Grant went back to work grimly.

  "Still," Brooks put in mildly, "our friend here doesn't show any evidence of exposure, at least not—"

  "Not yet! But it's a long seven-weeks' haul until we move into our solar system."

  "Maybe our techs can learn something from him about the Storm after his memory comes back. Bringing him back to Terra might just be critically important."

  "Or lethal," Grant muttered.

  The copper wires shifted in a droll attempt at a smile. "How about a name of some land? I might get tired of being called Turn' or 'that bloody bastard' for seven weeks!"

  From the controls, McGinn chirped, "You already got one, pall" They turned.

  "What do you mean?" Grant cracked.

  "Sorry, Cap. Didn't mention it before because you said not to handle anything about Ilmar when we removed and tossed out his gear. I got that little job, as you know, I found a scrap of nameplate in the neckpiece. It was pitted and chewed up, but there was half a name you could read. Ilmar."

  The humor lines deepened under the red beard.

  "At least I've got a name now. Ilmar."

  Ill

  Ilmar. His first knowledge of a personal identity. Even that wasn't certain; he could have been wearing somebody else's space gear. Still, it was a beginning, and he buffeted it around and around in his mind in the sleep-darks, trying to fashion it into a key that would unlock one of those bolted doors. Sometimes he would leap up from a nebulous nightmare of iunning, fighting—fighting, fleeing—with a sense of sweating urgency. There was something that he must do. Something unendurably sig^ nificant. Then would drift up a land of mindless cackling and even that much knowledge was buried again. His stiff muscles would relax a little and off he would go into more enigmatic nightmares.

  Came the time when his sudden waking was not sleep-mare.

  Ilmar bolted up so fast his head struck the curved ceiling over his narrow bunk. It came again, the wild pounding of fists on the cubicle door.

  Ilmar!"

  The muffled whisper was Brooks'. It was strangled out of dry desperate horror. Ilmar leaped off the bunk and flung open the hatch. In the half-light the medic's face was ash-gray and twisted.

  "What is it?"

  "Joe! Little Joe!"

  y/hat-

  "He's—sick." Brooks' shoulders were shaking.

  Ilmar was agape with sleep and flaying nightmares. "Sick?" He grabbed for Brooks' rocking shoulders but Brooks leaped back down the corridor with a whimpered cry. He wasn't wearing his r.a. shielding. Ilmar dropped his arm abruptly.

  "He wouldn't tell Grant," Brooks sobbed. "Not even me. I'm medic, but he knew it was no use." His wrenched-out words did not accuse Ilmar; they were bitter with grief, no more. "Joe must have been in hell for days. It was his watch, and it must have got so bad he couldn't make it. I put the ship on auto and came looking. I— I found him in the hatchway outside our double cabin. He tried to make it, falling apart as he was—"

  Brooks' passion of vomiting sobs shattered away talk. Ilmar knew there was a deep feeling between the men; there had to be out-of-the-ordinary friendship to sustain crewmen, as yet unseasoned as Capain Grant, locked up in a metal can hurtling across haunted voids.

  yid you tell Grant?"

  "Not—not yet. ListenI I came to warn youl" ^Warn?"

  "Don't you understand? Joe touched your suit, hunting for that nameplate. He came to see you without an r.a. shield. He told me. That's what did it."

  Ilmar stared out of hollow dead eyes. Self-horror welled up in his craw, choking away words and thoughts. With effort he forced it away.

  "You didn't touch his body?"

  "Sure!" Brooks voice rang with defiance. "Sure I did! I couldn't leave him lying there like that. I tried to pull him back up on his bunk but—" Horror overtook him for a few heartbeats. "—Joe f-fell apart. In my hands. His body came to pieces, while part of it was still alive!" He shuddered against the dark wall.

  Ilmar brushed past him, careful not to touch him as they moved down the narrow hatchway. When he saw the First Mate his neck-muscles became strangling ropes and it was mercy to turn away and retch.

  "He's dead now, thank God," Brooks said, in a land of crooning prayer. Then he pulled himself straight. "Listen, Ilmar—before I tell Captain Grant we've got to get busy. Get you off the ship!"

  "Off the ship!" Ilmar only stared. "What good would that do? Now?"

  "Captain Grant'll burn you, don't you see? And you're not really to blame! It's not your fault that you're immune to the Storm! What we've go to do while Captain Grant's still sleeping is change course. Move out of time-skip. Find a planet of some kind, or an asteroid. Put you in a suit and drop you on it in the boat before—"

  "Why? Why would you do that?" Ilmar was past caring about himself. He had no personal existence anyway, only a name. He was a breathing, walking horror. Let Captain Grant use a blaster on him as soon as possible. Burn the malignance he carried with him in one overwhelming burst of sunfire.

  "Ilmar! The way I figure it is—you're immune for a reason. Terra must know that reason. The rest of us don't matter. Hurry! Let's go!"

  Ilmar blocked his way to the control room with his virulent presence. He said it all in one word:

  "No."

  Staring down at the untidy heap of disintegrating cells that had once been his hand-picked, likable, impudent First Mate, Captain Grant's eyes became round chunks of glacial ice. Brooks was weeping again for his lost buddy. Ilmar stood aside, watching them gravely, as if all of this had nothing whatever to do with him. It was just another of his recurrent nightmares.

  Finally Grant's r.a. protected hand moved to close the death-cabin door.

  They followed him to main cabin. Brooks checked the controls. Captain Grant stared at Ilmar bleakly.

  "Would you prefer to do it yourself?"

  Brooks cried: "Nol"

  "I thought Joe was your friend."

  Brooks went into a rapid-fire dissertation about Ilmar being immune and Terran scientists must have the opportunity for discovering why. It was more important than they were, more important than Grant's fanatical devotion to his starship. Grant listened grimly.

  "The question is, will we make it to Terra?"

  Brooks' face flamed with dedication. Ilmar thought it was that McGinn must not have died for nothing. They must not die for nothing. There must be meaning to all of this ravening horror.

  Captain Grant whipped behind his desk, checking the ship's course, calculating. His cold-fire eyes moved thoughtfully from Ilmar to Brooks.

  "McGinn touched the nameplate. Gloves, but not r.a. He visited Ilmar, unshielded. Naturally he was first to go. So we know the amount of contagion Ilmar carries is very small, in comparison to the instantaneous rubble the ships that hit the fringe become. Maybe it was a random spit tentacle flung out from the ellipse. Who knows? Anyway, (lie effect's cumulative. And—" His eyes softened on Brooks in ordinary Fleet tunic. "You're next."

  Ilmar saw the medic's lips go white.

  "Yes," he clipped out. "I shared Joe's cabin. I was careful to keep shielded,
as you told us, but—" He held up his bare hands.

  Captain Grant went to work, feeding data into the computer in the control wall. "Time," he muttered. "We've got to buy time! It's not only us. It's the ship. If the engines get it, or the computer, or the automatics—"

  Watching and listening to the two of them discussing their deaths and the ship's death with fine assumed calm, Ilmar found his spectator's indifference drop away. It was sloughed off by a cellular storm spreading out from his groin in all directions, howling through him, tearing bis veins and his nerves.

  "Maybe you can take it," he muttered. "I can't."

  Captain Grant flicked him a waxen glance; Brooks stood across the desk from him like a totem, staring at the winking lights on the computer as its tremendous, condensed brain whipped through the data Grant had fed it.

  Ilmar moved; he ran onto the balcony catwalk above the cabins and engine hatches. He lunged down the ladder to the narrow down-corridor to the outside hatch with the red eye on it and the sign lettered in red: dan-

  geb. do not remove clamp oh touch lever to airlock.

  Ilmar touched. He snapped back the precautionary clamp over the airlock lever and had the door open, even before the hissing air had filled it. Brooks' awkward tackle caught him while his stringy form was bent and stepping through the oval hatch. He lashed out, but Brooks' sobbing determination spun him down. That he was touching Brooks' bare hands made him shudder. He lay in the curved comer, blinking and swearing.

  "All right I Get away from me!"

  Brooks moved back and reclosed the airlock. A land of triumph glowed in his scholarly face. "Don't you see, Ilmar? I think we're going to make itl"

  Captain Grant's smile, behind the medic, was slightly ghastly. "Yes. The odds are rough, but it's mathematically possible. Brooks is right. The only thing that'll keep us going at this point is getting you back to Terra. Alive."

  IV

  Ii.mar holed up in his cubicle like a rat. He heard them moving heavy plates of shielding around him and his cell, but he didn't open the hatch except to pick up the tray of food Brooks left there every haft day. Guilt rode him through every waking hour and strangled away exhausted sleep with nightmares. He ran down benighted corridors, battering his fists against those iron doors until his hands were ragged stumps. Only once, when he opened the door too soon, did he see Brooks. He wasn't Brooks any more. He was a stalking horror with skeleton hands and wide dead eyes. It was a long time before he opened the door again.