Emptiness of Space (12 from The Best of John Wyndham)

Published 1973
ISBN 0 7221 9369 6
Copyright© The Executors of the Estate of the late John Wyndham 1973

INTRODUCTION

AT a very tender age my latent passion for all forms of fantasy stories, having been sparked by the Brothers Grimm and the more unusual offerings in the children's comics and later the boy's adventure papers, was encouraged in the early 1930s by the occasional exciting find on the shelves of the public library with Burroughs and Thorne Smith varying the staple diet of Wells and Verne.

But the decisive factor in establishing that exhilarating ‘sense of wonder’ in my youthful imagination was the discovery about that time of back numbers of American science fiction magazines to be bought quite cheaply in stores like Woolworths. The happy chain of economic circumstances by which American newstand returns, sometimes sadly with the magic cover removed or mutilated, ballasted cargo ships returning to English ports and the colonies, must have been the mainspring of many an enthusiastic hobby devoted to reading, discussing, perhaps collecting and even writing, science fiction – or ‘scientifiction’ as Hugo Gernsback coined the tag in his early Amazing Stories magazine.

Gernsback was a great believer in reader participation; in 1936 I became a teenage member of the Science Fiction League sponsored by his Wonder Stories. Earlier he had run a competition in its forerunner Air Wonder Stories to find a suitable banner slogan, offering the prize of ‘One Hundred Dollars in Gold’ with true yankee braggadacio. Discovering the result some years later in, I think, the September 1930 issue of Wonder Stories seized upon from the bargain-bin of a chain store, was akin to finding a message in a bottle cast adrift by some distant Robinson Crusoe, and I well remember the surge of jingoistic pride (an educational trait well-nurtured in pre-war Britain) in noting that the winner was an Englishman, John Beynon Harris.

I had not the slightest anticipation then that I would later meet, and acknowledge as a good friend and mentor, this contest winner who, as John Wyndham, was to become one of the greatest English story-tellers in the idiom. The fact that he never actually got paid in gold was a disappointment, he once told me, that must have accounted for the element of philosophical dubiety in some of his work. Certainly his winning slogan ‘Future Flying Fiction’, although too late to save the magazine from foundering on the rock of economic depression (it had already been amalgamated with its stablemate Science Wonder Stories to become just plain, if that is the right word, Wonder Stories), presaged the firm stamp of credibility combined with imaginative flair that characterized JBH's writings.

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (the abundance of forenames conveniently supplied his various aliases) emerged in the 1950s as an important contemporary influence on speculative fiction, particularly in the exploration of the theme of realistic global catastrophe, with books such as The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, and enjoyed a popularity, which continued after his sad death in 1969, comparable to that of his illustrious predecessor as master of the scientific romance, H. G. Wells.

However, he was to serve his writing apprenticeship in those same pulp magazines of the thirties, competing successfully with their native American contributors, and it is the purpose of this present collection to highlight the chronological development of his short stories from those early beginnings to the later urbane and polished style of John Wyndham.

‘The Lost Machine’ was his second published story, appearing in Amazing Stories, and was possibly the prototype of the sentient robot later developed by such writers as Isaac Asimov. He used a variety of plots during this early American period particularly favouring time travel, and the best of these was undoubtedly ‘The Man From Beyond’ in which the poignancy of a man's realization, caged in a zoo on Venus, that far from being abandoned by his fellow-explorers, he is the victim of a far stranger fate, is remarkably outlined for its time. Some themes had dealt with war, such as ‘The Trojan Beam’, and he had strong views to express on its futility. Soon his own induction into the Army in 1940 produced a period of creative inactivity corresponding to World War II. He had, however, previously established himself in England as a prominent science fiction writer with serials in major periodicals, subsequently reprinted in hard covers, and he even had a detective novel published. He had been well represented too – ‘Perfect Creature’ is an amusing example – in the various magazines stemming from fan activity, despite the vicissitudes of their pre- and immediate post-war publishing insecurity.

But after the war and into the fifties the level of science fiction writing in general had increased considerably, and John rose to the challenge by selling successfully to the American market again. In England his polished style proved popular and a predilection for the paradoxes of time travel as a source of private amusement was perfectly exemplified in ‘Pawley's Peepholes’, in which the gawping tourists from the future are routed by vulgar tactics. This story was later successfully adapted for radio and broadcast by the B.B.C.

About this time his first post-war novel burst upon an unsuspecting world, and by utilizing a couple of unoriginal ideas with his Gernsback-trained attention to logically based explanatory detail and realistic background, together with his now strongly developed narrative style, ‘The Day of the Triffids’ became one of the classics of modern speculative fiction, surviving even a mediocre movie treatment. It was the forerunner of a series of equally impressive and enjoyable novels including ‘The Chrysalids’ and ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ which was successfully filmed as ‘Village of the Damned’. (A sequel ‘Children of the Damned’ was markedly inferior, and John was careful to disclaim any responsibility for the writing.)

I was soon to begin an enjoyable association with John Wyndham that had its origins in the early days of the New Worlds magazine-publishing venture, and was later to result in much kindly and essential assistance enabling me to become a specialist dealer in the genre. This was at the Fantasy Book Centre in Bloomsbury, an area of suitably associated literary activities where John lived for many years, and which provided many pleasurable meetings at a renowned local coffee establishment, Cawardine's, where we were often joined by such personalities as John Carnell, John Christopher and Arthur C. Clarke.

In between the novels two collections of his now widely published short stories were issued as ‘The Seeds of Time’ and ‘Consider Her Ways’; others are reprinted here for the first time. He was never too grand to refuse material for our own New Worlds and in 1958 wrote a series of four novelettes about the Troon family's contribution to space exploration – a kind of Forsyte saga of the solar system later collected under the title ‘The Outward Urge’. His fictitious collaborator ‘Lucas Parkes’ was a subtle ploy in the book version to explain Wyndham's apparent deviation into solid science-based fiction. The last story in this collection ‘The Emptiness of Space’ was written as a kind of postscript to that series, especially for the 100th anniversary issue of New Worlds.

John Wyndham's last novel was Chocky, published in 1968. It was an expansion of a short story following a theme similar to The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos. It was a theme peculiarly appropriate for him in his advancing maturity. When, with characteristic reticence and modesty, he announced to a few of his friends that he was marrying his beloved Grace and moving to the countryside, we all felt that this was a well-deserved retirement for them both.

But ironically time – always a fascinating subject for speculation by him – was running out for this typical English gentleman. Amiable, erudite, astringently humorous on occasion, he was, in the same way that the gentle Boris Karloff portrayed his film monsters, able to depict the nightmares of humanity with frightening realism, made the more deadly by his masterly precision of detail. To his great gift for story-telling he brought a lively intellect and a fertile imagination.

I am glad to be numbered among the many, many thousands of his readers whose ‘sense of wonder’ has been satisfactorily indulged by a writer whose gift to posterity is the compulsive readability of his stories of which this present volume is an essential part.

EMPTINESS OF SPACE (1953)

My first visit to New Caledonia was in the summer of 2199. At that time an exploration party under the leadership of Gilbert Troon was cautiously pushing its way up the less radio-active parts of Italy, investigating the prospects of reclamation. My firm felt there might be a popular book in it, and assigned me to put the proposition to Gilbert. When I arrived, however, it was to find that he had been delayed, and was now expected a week later. I was not at all displeased. A few days of comfortable laziness on a Pacific island, all paid for and counting as work, is the kind of perquisite I like.

New Caledonia is a fascinating spot, and well worth the trouble of getting a landing permit — if you can get one. It has more of the past — and more of the future, too, for that matter — than any other place, and somehow it manages to keep them almost separate.

At one time the island, and the group, were, in spite of the name, a French colony. But in 2044, with the eclipse of Europe in the Great Northern War, it found itself, like other ex-colonies dotted all about the world, suddenly thrown upon its own resources. While most mainland colonies hurried to make treaties with their nearest powerful neighbours, many islands such as New Caledonia bald little to offer and not much to fear, and so let things drift.

For two generations the surviving nations were far too occupied by the tasks of bringing equilibrium to a half-wrecked world to take any interest in scattered islands. It was not until the Brazilians began to see Australia as a possible challenger of their supremacy that they started a policy of unobtrusive, and tactfully mercantile, expansion into the Pacific. Then, naturally, it occurred to the Australians, too, that it was time to begin to extend their economic influence over various island-groups.

The New Caledonians resisted infiltration. They had found independence congenial, and steadily rebuffed temptations by both parties. The year 2144, in which Space declared for independence, found them still resisting; but the pressure was now considerable. They had watched one group of islands after another succumb to trade preferences, and thereafter virtually slide back to colonial status, and they now found it difficult to doubt that before long the same would happen to themselves when, whatever the form of words, they should be annexed — most likely by the Australians in order to forestall the establishment of a Brazilian base there, within a thousand miles of the coast.

It was into this situation that Jayme Gonveia, speaking for Space, stepped in 2150 with a suggestion of his own. He offered the New Caledonians guaranteed independence of either big Power, a considerable quantity of cash and a prosperous future if they would grant Space a lease of territory which would become its Earth headquarters and main terminus.

The proposition was not altogether to the New Caledonian taste, but it was better than the alternatives. They accepted, and the construction of the Spaceyards was begun.

Since then the island has lived in a curious symbiosis. In the north are the rocket landing and dispatch stages, warehouses and engineering shops, and a way of life furnished with all modern techniques, while the other four-fifths of the island all but ignores it, and contentedly lives much as it did two and a half centuries ago. Such a state of affairs cannot be preserved by accident in this world. It is the result of careful contrivance both by the New Caledonians who like it that way, and by Space which dislikes outsiders taking too close an interest in its affairs. So, for permission to land anywhere in the group, one needs hard-won visas from both authorities. The result is no exploitation by tourists or salesmen, and a scarcity of strangers.

However, there I was, with an unexpected week of leisure to put in, and no reason why I should spend it in Space-Concession territory. One of the secretaries suggested Lahua, down in the south at no great distance from Noumea, the capital, as a restful spot, so thither I went.

Lahua has picture-book charm. It is a small fishing town, half-tropical, half-French. On its wide white beach there are still canoes, working canoes, as well as modern. At one end of the curve a mole gives shelter for a small anchorage, and there the palms that fringe the rest of the shore stop to make room for a town.

Many of Lahua's houses are improved-traditional, still thatched with palm, but its heart is a cobbled rectangle surrounded by entirely untropical houses, known as the Grande Place. Here are shops, pavement cafes, stalls of fruit under bright striped awnings guarded by Gauguin-esque women, a state of Bougainville, an atrociously ugly church on the east side, a pissoir, and even a mairie. The whole thing might have been imported complete from early twentieth-century France, except for the inhabitants — but even they, some in bright sarongs, some in European clothes, must have looked much the same when France ruled there.

I found it difficult to believe that they are real people living real lifes. For the first day I was constantly accompanied by the feeling that an unseen director would suddenly call ‘Cut’, and it would all come to a stop.

On the second morning I was growing more used to it. I bathed, and then with a sense that I was beginning to get the feel of the life, drifted to the place, in search of aperitif. I chose a café on the south side where a few trees shaded the tables, and wondered what to order. My usual drinks seemed out of key. A dusky, brightly saronged girl approached. On an impulse, and feeling like a character out of a very old novel I suggested a pernod. She took it as a matter of course.

I sat there looking across the Square, less busy now that the dejeuner hour was close, wondering what Sydney and Rio, Adelaide and São Paulo had gained and lost since they had been the size of Lahua, and doubting the value of the gains...

The pernod arrived. I watched it cloud with water, and sipped it cautiously. An odd drink, scarcely calculated, I felt, to enhance the appetite. As I contemplated it a voice spoke from behind my right shoulder.

“An island product, but from the original recipe,” it said. “Quite safe, in moderation, I assure you.”

I turned in my chair. The speaker was seated at the next table; a well-built, compact, sandy-haired man, dressed in a spotless white suit, a panama hat with a coloured band, and wearing a neatly trimmed, pointed beard. I guess his age at about thirty-four though the grey eyes that met my own looked older, more experienced and troubled.

“A taste that I have not had the opportunity to acquire,” I told him. He nodded.

“You won't find it outside. In some ways we are a museum here, but little the worse, I think, for that.”

“One of the later Muses,” I suggested. “The Muse of Recent History. And very fascinating, too.”

I became aware that one or two men at tables within earshot were paying us — or rather me — some attention; their expressions were not unfriendly, but they showed what seemed to be traces of concern.

“It is —” my neighbour began to reply, and then broke off, cut short by a rumble in the sky.

I turned to see a slender white spire stabbing up into the blue overhead. Already, by the time the sound reached us, the rocket at its apex was too small to be visible. The man cocked an eye at it.

“They wouldn't if you were inside. The acceleration in that shuttle would spread you all over the floor — very thinly,” he said, and then went on: “We don't often see strangers in Lahua. Perhaps you would care to give me the pleasure of your company for luncheon? My name, by the way, is George.”

I hesitated, and while I did I noticed over his shoulder an elderly man who moved his lips slightly as he gave me what was without doubt an encouraging nod. I decided to take a chance on it.

“That's very kind of you. My name is David — David Myford, from Sydney,” I told him. But he made no amplification regarding himself, so I was left wondering whether George was his forename, or his surname.

“Unless you are averse to fish you must try the bouillabaisse — spécialité de la maison,” he told me.

I was aware that I had gamed the approval of the elderly man, and apparently of some others as well, by joining George. The waitress, too, had an approving air. J won-dered vaguely what was going on, and whether I had been let in for the town bore, to protect the rest.

“From Sydney,” he said reflectively. “It's a long time since I saw Sydney. I don't suppose I'd know it now.”

“It keeps on growing,” I admitted, “but Nature would always prevent you from confusing it with anywhere else.”

We went on chatting. The bouillabaisse arrived; and excellent it was. There were hunks of first-class bread, too, cut from those long loaves you see in pictures in old European book. I began to feel, with the help of the local wine, that a lot could be said for the twentieth-century way of living.

In the course of our talk it emerged that George had been a rocket pilot, but was grounded now — not, one would judge, for reasons of health, so I did not inquire further...

The second course was an excellent coupe of fruits I had never heard of, and, overall, iced passion-fruit juice. It was when the coffee came that he said, rather wistfully I thought:

“I had hoped you might be able to help me, Mr. Myford, but it now seems to me that you are not a man of faith.”

“Surely everyone has to be very much a man of faith,” I protested. “For everything a man cannot do for himself he has to have faith in others.”

“True,” he conceded. “I should have said ‘spiritual faith’. You do not speak as one who is interested in the nature and destiny of his soul — or of anyone else's soul — I fear?”

I felt that I perceived what was coming next. However if he was interested in saving my soul he had at least begun the operation by looking after my bodily needs with a generously good meal.

“When I was young,” I told him, “I used to worry quite a lot about my soul, but later I decided that that was largely a matter of vanity.”

“Certainly,” I agreed. “It is chiefly with the conception of the soul as a separate entity that I find myself out of sympathy. For me it is a manifestation of mind which is, in its turn, a product of the brain, For me it is a manifestation of mind which is, in its turn, a product of the brain, modified by the external environment and influenced more directly by the glands.”

“You are so wrong — so very wrong. Some are always conscious of their souls, others, like yourself, are unaware of them, but no one knows the true value of his soul as long as he has it. It is not until a man has lost his soul that he understands its value.”

It was not an observation making for easy rejoinder, so I let the silence between us continue. Presently he looked up into the northern sky where the trail of the moon-bound shuttle had long since blown away. With embarrassment I observed two large tears flow from the inner corners of his eyes and trickle down beside his nose. He, however, showed no embarrassment; he simply pulled out a large, white, beautifully laundered handkerchief, and dealt with them.

“I hope you will never learn what a dreadful thing it is to have no soul,” he told me, with a shake of his head. “It is to hold the emptiness of space in one's heart: to sit by the waters of Babylon for the rest of one's life.”

“Of course you don't. No one understands. But always one keeps on hoping that one day there will come somebody who does understand and can help.”

“But the soul is a manifestation of the self,” I said. “I don't see how that can be lost — it can be changed, perhaps, but not lost.”

“Mine is,” he said, still looking up into the vast blue. “Lost — adrift somewhere out there. Without it I am a sham. A man who has lost a leg or an arm is still a man, but a man who has lost his soul is nothing — nothing — nothing...”

“Perhaps a psychiatrist—” I started to suggest, uncertainly. That stirred him, and checked the tears.

“Psychiatrist!” he exclaimed scornfully. “Damned frauds! I Even to the word. They may know a bit about minds; but about the psyche! — why they even deny its existence...!”

“There was a chance. You might have been one who could. There's always the chance...” he said consolingly, though whether he was consoling himself or me seemed moot. At this point the church clock struck two. My host's mood changed. He got up quite briskly.

“I have to go now,” he told me. “I wish you had been the one, but it has been a pleasant encounter all the same. I hope you enjoy Lahua.”

I watched him make his way along the place. At one stall he paused, selected a peach-like fruit and bit into it. The woman beamed at him amiably, apparently unconcerned about payment.

“O le pauvre monsieur Georges,” she said sadly. We watched him climb the church steps, throw away the remnant of his fruit, and remove his hat to enter. “Il va jaire la prière,” she explained. “Tous les jours 'e make pray for 'is soul. In ze morning, in ze afternoon. C'est si triste.”

I noticed the bill in her hand. I fear that for a moment I misjudged George, but it had been a good lunch. I reached for my notecase. The girl noticed, and shook her head.

“Non, non, monsieur, non. Vous êtes convive. C'est d'accord. Alors, monsier Georges 'e sign bill tomorrow. S'arrange. C'est okay,” she insisted, and stuck to it.

“It's all right — quite in order,” he assured me. Then he added: “Perhaps if you are not in a hurry you would care to take a café-cognac with me?”

There seemed to be a fine open-handedness about Lahua. I accepted, and joined him.

I admitted this was so. He shook his head in reproof of persons unknown, and added:

“Never mind. All went well. George always has hopes of a stranger, you see: sometimes one has been known to laugh. We don't like that.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I told him. “His state strikes me as very far from funny.”

“It is indeed,” he agreed. “But he's improving. I doubt whether he knows it himself, but he is. A year ago he would often weep quietly through the whole dejeuner. Rather depressing until one got used to it.”

“He exists. He spends more of his time in the church. For the rest he wanders round. He sleeps at that big white house up on the hill. His granddaughter's place. She sees that he's decently turned out, and pays the bills for whatever he fancies down here.”

“His granddaughter!” I exclaimed. “But he's a young man. He can't be much over thirty...”

“You'll very likely come across him again. Just as well to know how things stand. Of course it isn't the sort of thing the family likes to publicize, but there's no secret about it.”

About five years ago (he said), yes, it would be in 2194, young Gerald Troon was taking a ship out to one of the larger asteroids — the one that de Gasparis called Psyche when he spotted it in 1852. The ship was a space-built freighter called the Celestis working from the moon-base. Her crew was five, with not bad accommodation forward. Apart from that and the motor-section these ships are not much more than one big hold which is very often empty on the outward journeys unless it is carrying gear to set up new workings. This time it was empty because the assignment was simply to pick up a load of uranium ore — Psyche is half made of high-yield ore, and all that was necessary was to set going the digging machinery already on the site, and load the stuff in. It seemed simple enough.

But the Asteroid Belt is still a very tricky area, you know. The main bodies and groups are charted, of course —but that only helps you to find them. The place is full of out-fliers of all sizes that you couldn't hope to chart, but have to avoid. About the best you can do is to tackle the Belt as near to your objective as possible, reduce speed until you are little more than local orbit velocity and then edge your way in, going very canny. The trouble is the time it can take to keep on fiddling along that way for thousands — hundreds of thousands, maybe — of miles. Fellows get bored and inattentive, or sick to death of it and start to take chances. I don't know what the answer is. You can bounce radar off the big chunks and hitch that up to a course-deflector to keep you away from them. But the small stuff is just as deadly to a ship, and there's so much of it about that if you were to make the course-deflector sensitive enough to react to it you'd have your ship shying off everything the whole time, and getting nowhere. What we want is someone to come up with a kind of repulse mechanism with only a limited range of operation — say, a hundred miles — but no one does. So, as I say, it's tricky. Since they first started to tackle it back in 2150 they've lost half a dozen ships in there and had a dozen more damaged one way or another. Not a nice place at all ... On the other hand, uranium is uranium...

Gerald's a good lad though. He had the authentic Troon yen for space without being much of a chancer; besides, Psyche isn't too far from the inner rim of the orbit — not nearly the approach problem Ceres is, for instance — what's more, he'd done it several times before.

Well, he got into the Belt, and jockeyed and fiddled and niggled his way until he was about three hundred miles out from Psyche and getting ready to come in. Perhaps he'd got a bit careless by then; in any case he'd not be expecting to find anything in orbit around the asteroid. But that's just what he did find — the hard way...

There was a crash which made the whole ship ring round him and his crew as if they were in an enormous bell. It's about the nastiest — and very likely to be the last — sound a spaceman can ever hear. This time, however, their luck was in. It wasn't too bad. They discovered that as they crowded to watch the indicator dials. It was soon evident that nothing vital had been hit, and they were able to release their breath.

Gerald turned over the controls to his First, and he and the engineer, Steve, pulled space-suits out of the locker. When the airlock opened they hitched their safety-lines on to spring hooks, and slid their way aft along the hull on magnetic soles. It was soon clear that the damage was not on the air-lock side, and they worked round the curve of the hull.

One can't say just what they expected to find — probably an embedded hunk of rock, or maybe just a gash in the side of the hold — anyway it was certainly not what they did find, which was half of a small space-ship projecting out of their own hull.

One thing was evident right away — that it had hit with no great force. If it had, it would have gone right through and out the other side, for the hold of a freighter is little more than a single-walled cylinder: there is no need for it to be more, it doesn't have to conserve warmth, or contain air, or resist the friction of an atmosphere, nor does it have to contend with any more gravitational pull than that of the moon; it is only in the living-quarters that there have to be the complexities necessary to sustain life.

Another thing, which was immediately clear, was that this was not the only misadventure that had befallen the small ship. Something had, at some time, sliced off most of its after part, carrying away not only the driving tubes but the mixing-chambers as well, and leaving it hopelessly disabled.

Shuffling round the wreckage to inspect it, Gerald found no entrance. It was thoroughly jammed into the hole it had made, and its air-lock must lie forward, somewhere inside the freighter. He sent Steve back for a cutter and for a key that would get them into the hold. While he waited he spoke through his helmet-radio to the operator in the Cel-estis's living-quarters, and explained the situation. He added:

He heard Jake open up and call. There was a pause while the waves crossed and re-crossed the millions of miles between them, then a voice :

“Hullo, Celestis! Hullo Celestis! Moon-Station responding. Go ahead, Jake. Over!”

Gerald waited out the exchange patiently. Radio waves are some of the things that can't be hurried. In due course another voice spoke.

“Hello, Celestis! Moon-Station Duty Officer speaking Give your location and go ahead.”

“Hullo, Charles. This is Gerald Troon calling from Cel-estis now in orbit about Psyche. Approximately three-twenty miles altitude. I am notifying damage by collision. No harm to personnel. Not repeat not in danger. Damage appears to be confined to empty hold-section. Cause of damage...” He went on to give particulars, and concluded: “I am about to investigate. Will report further. Please keep the link open. Over!”

The engineer returned, floating a self-powered cutter with him on a short safety-cord, and holding the key which would screw back the bolts of the hold's entrance-port. Gerald took the key, placed it in the hole beside the door, and inserted his legs into the two staples that would give him the purchase to wind it.

“Hullo, Ticker. Understand no immediate danger. But don't go taking any chances, boy. Can you identify the derelict?”

“Repeat no danger,” Troon told him. “Plumb lucky. If she'd hit six feet farther forward we'd have had real trouble. I have now opened small door of the hold, and am going in to examine the forepart of the derelict. Will try to identify it.”

The cavernous darkness of the hold made it necessary for them to switch on their helmet lights. They could now see the front part of the derelict; it took up about half the space there was. The ship had punched through the wall, turning back the tough alloy in curled petals, as though it had been tinplate. She had come to rest with her nose a bare couple of feet short of the opposite side. The two of them surveyed her for some moments. Steve pointed to a ragged hole, some five or six inches across, about halfway along the embedded section. It had a nasty significance that caused Gerald to nod sombrely.

He shuffled to the ship, and on to its curving side. He found the air-lock on the top, as it lay in the Celestis, and tried the winding key. He pulled it out again.

“Calling you, Charles,” he said. “No identifying marks on the derelict. She's not space-built — that is, she could be used in atmosphere. Oldish pattern — well, must be — she's pre the standardization of winding keys, so that takes us back a bit. Maximum external diameter, say, twelve feet. Length unknown — can't say how much after part there was before it was knocked off. She's been holed forward, too. Looks like a small meteorite, about five inches. At speed, I'd say. Just a minute ... Yes, clean through and out, with a pretty small exit hole. Can't open the air-lock without making a new key. Quicker to cut our way in. Over!”

He shuffled back, and played his light through the small meteor hole. His helmet prevented him getting his face close enough to see anything but a small part of the opposite wall, with a corresponding hole in it.

The engineer nodded. He brought his cutter to bear, switched it on and began to carve from the edge of the hole.

“Not much good, Ticker,” came the voice from the moon. “The bit you gave could apply to any one of four ships.”

“Patience, dear Charles, while Steve does his bit of fancy-work with the cutter,” Troon told him.

It took twenty minutes to complete the cut through the double hull. Steve switched off, gave a tug with his left hand, and the joined, inner and outer circles of metal floated away.

“Celestis calling moon. I am about to go into the derelict, Charles. Keep open,” Troon said.

He bent down, took hold of the sides of the cut, kicked his magnetic soles free of contact and gave a light pull which took him floating head-first through the hole in the manner of an underwater swimmer. Presently his voice came again, with a different tone:

“I say, Charles, there are three men in here. All in space-suits — old-time space-suits. Two of them are belted on to their bunks. The other one is ... Oh, his leg's gone. The meteorite must have taken it off ... There's a queer — Oh, God, it's his blood frozen into a solid ball...!”

“I've found the log. Can't handle it in these gloves, though. I'll take it aboard, and let you have particulars. The two fellows on the bunks seem to be quite intact — their suits I mean. Their helmets have those curved strip-windows so I can't see much of their faces. Must've — that's odd ... Each of them has a sort of little book attached by a wire to the suit fastener. On the cover it has: ‘Danger — Perigoso’ in red, and, underneath: ‘Do not remove suit — Read instructions within,’ repeated in Portuguese. Then: ‘Hapson Survival System.’ What would all that mean, Charles? Over!”

While he waited for the reply Gerald clumsily fingered one of the tag-like books and discovered that it opened concertina-wise, a series of small metal plates hinged together printed on one side in English and on the other in Portuguese. The first leaf carried little print, but what there was was striking. It ran ‘CAUTION! Do NOT open suit until you have read these instructions or you will KILL the wearer.’

“Hullo, Ticker. I've called the Doc. He says do NOT, repeat NOT, touch the two men on any account. Hang on, he's coming to talk to you. He says the Hapson system was scrapped over thirty years ago — He — oh, here he is...”

“Ticker? Laysall here. Charles tells me you've found a couple of Hapsons, undamaged. Please confirm, and give circumstances.”

Troon did so. In due course the doctor came back: “Okay. That sounds fine. Now listen carefully, Ticker. From what you say it's practically certain those two are not dead — yet. They're — well, they're in cold storage. That part of the Hapson system was good. You'll see a kind of boss mounted on the left of the chest. The thing to do in the case of extreme emergency was to slap it good and hard. When you do that it gives a multiple injection. Part of the stuff puts you out. Part of it prevents the building-up in the body of large ice crystals that would damage the tissues. Part of it — oh well, that'll do later. The point is that it works practically a hundred per cent. You get Nature's own deepfreeze in space. And if there's something to keep off direct radiation from the sun you stay like that until somebody finds you — if anyone ever does. Now I take it that these two have been in the dark of an airless ship which is now in the airless hold of your ship. Is that right?”

“That's so Doc. There are two small meteorite holes, but they would not get direct beams from there.”

“Fine. Then keep 'em just like that. Take care they don't get warmed. Don't try anything the instruction-sheet says. The point is that though the success of the Hapson freeze is almost sure, the resuscitation isn't. In fact, it's very dodgy indeed — a poorer than twenty-five-per-cent chance at best. You get lethal crystal formations building up, for one thing. What I suggest is that you try to get 'em back exactly as they are. Our apparatus here will give them the best chance they can have. Can you do that?”

“We don't want to waste this trip — and that's what'll happen if we pull the derelict out of our side to leave a hole we can't mend. But if we leave her where she is, plugging the hole, we can at least take on a half-load of ore. And if we pack that well in, it'll help to wedge the derelict in place. So suppose we leave the derelict just as she lies, and the men too, and seal her up to keep the ore out of her. Would that suit?”

“That should be as good as can be done,” the doctor replied. “But have a look at the two men before you leave them. Make sure they're secure in their bunks. As long as they are kept in space conditions about the only thing likely to harm them is breaking loose under acceleration, and getting damaged.”

“Very well, that's what we'll do. Anyway, we'll not be using any high acceleration the way things are. The other poor fellow shall have a space burial...”

An hour later both Gerald and his companions were back in the Celestis's living-quarters, and the First Officer was starting to manoeuvre for the spiral-in to Psyche. The two got out of their space-suits. Gerald pulled the derelict's log from the outside pocket, and took it to his bunk. There he fastened the belt, and opened the book.

Five minutes later Steve looked across at him from the opposite bunk, with concern.

“I'm feeling a bit queer, Steve ... That chap we took out and consigned to space, he was Terence Rice, wasn't he?”

“H'm.” Gerald Troon paused. Then he tapped the book. “This,” he said, “is the log of the Astarte. She sailed from the Moon-Station 3 January 2149 — forty-five years ago — bound for the Asteroid Belt. There was a crew of three: Captain George Montgomery Troon, engineer Luis Gom-pez, radio-man Terence Rice...

“So, as the unlucky one was Terence Rice, it follows that one of those two back there must be Gompez, and the other — well, must be George Montgomery Troon, the one who made the Venus landing in 2144 ... And, incidentally, my grandfather...”

“Well,” said my companion, “they got them back all right. Gompez was unlucky, though — at least I suppose you'd call it unlucky — anyway, he didn't come through the resuscitation. George did, of course...

“But there's more to resuscitation than mere revival. There's a degree of physical shock in any case, and when you've been under as long as he had there's plenty of mental shock, too.

“He went under, a youngish man with a young family; he woke up to find himself a great-grandfather; his wife a very old lady who had remarried; his friends gone, or elderly; his two companions in the Astarte dead.”

“That was bad enough, but worse still was that he knew all about the Hapson System. He knew that when you go into a deep-freeze the whole metabolism comes quickly to a complete stop. You are, by every known definition and test, dead ... Corruption cannot set in, of course, but every vital process has stopped; every single feature which we regard as evidence of life has ceased to exist...

“So if you believe, as George does, that your psyche, your soul, has independent existence, then it must have left your body when you died.”

“And how do you get it back? That's what George wants to know — and that's why he's over there now, praying to be told...”

I leant back in my chair, looking across the place at the dark opening of-the church door.

“You mean to say that that young man, that George who was here just now, is the very same George Montgomery Troon who made the first landing on Venus, half a century ago?” I said.

“God knows,” said my neighbour. “He is getting better; he's less distressed than he was. And now he's beginning to show touches of the real Troon obsession to get into space again.

“But what then? ... You can't ship a Troon as crew. And you can't have a Captain who might take it into his head to go hunting through Space for his soul...

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

EMPTINESS OF SPACE (1953)

BOOK INFORMATION