Stranger Station Read online

  Stranger Station

  Damon Knight

  From Robert Silverberg’s “Earthmen and Strangers” anthology, 1966:

  Damon Knight is a slender, soft-spoken man with a deceptively mild smile. He seems gentle and relaxed, but behind the tranquil exterior there seethes a fiercely active mind. Knight has served science fiction as an editor of magazines and anthologies, as a feared and respected critic, as a translator from the French, and as a leader of writers’ conferences and organizations. When not engaged in any of these activities, he writes a little of the stuff himself. His short stories are marked by graceful style, stunning execution, and a profound understanding of character.

  All these virtues are on display in the present work—plus a chilling portrayal of a weird relationship between man and nonman. Few stories have captured the sense of differentness in an alien being as awesomely well as this one.

  Stranger Station

  by Damon Knight

  The clang of metal echoed hollowly down through the Station’s many vaulted corridors and rooms. Paul Wesson stood listening for a moment as the rolling echoes died away. The maintenance rocket was gone, heading back to Home; they had left him alone in Stranger Station.

  Stranger Station! The name itself quickened his imagination. Wesson knew that both orbital stations had been named a century ago by the then-British administration of the satellite service; “Home” because the larger, inner station handled the traffic of Earth and its colonies; “Stranger” because the outer station was designed specifically for dealings with foreigners—beings from outside the solar system. But even that could not diminish the wonder of Stranger Station, whirling out here alone in the dark—waiting for its once-in-two-decades visitor…

  One man, out of all Sol’s billions, had the task and privilege of enduring the alien’s presence when it came. The two races, according to Wesson’s understanding of the subject, were so fundamentally different that it was painful for them to meet. Well, he had volunteered for the job, and he thought he could handle it—the rewards were big enough.

  He had gone through all the tests, and against his own expectations he had been chosen. The maintenance crew had brought him up as dead weight, drugged in a survival hamper; they had kept him the same way while they did their work and then had brought him back to consciousness. Now they were gone. He was alone.

  But not quite.

  “Welcome to Stranger Station, Sergeant Wesson,” said a pleasant voice. “This is your alpha network speaking. I’m here to protect and serve you in every way. If there’s anything you want, just ask me.” It was a neutral voice, with a kind of professional friendliness in it, like that of a good schoolteacher or rec supervisor.

  Wesson had been warned, but he was still shocked at the human quality of it. The alpha networks were-the last word in robot brains—computers, safety devices, personal servants, libraries, all wrapped up in one, with something so close to “personality” and “free will” that experts were still arguing the question. They were rare and fantastically expensive; Wesson had never met one before.

  “Thanks,” he said now, to the empty air. “Uh—what do I call you, by the way? I can’t keep saying, ‘Hey, alpha network.’ ”

  “One of your recent predecessors called me Aunt Nettie,” was the response.

  Wesson grimaced. Alpha network—Aunt Nettie. He hated puns; that wouldn’t do. “The aunt part is all right,” he said. “Suppose I call you Aunt Jane. That was my mother’s sister; you sound like her, a little bit.”

  “I am honored,” said the invisible mechanism politely. “Can I serve you any refreshments now? Sandwiches? A drink?”

  “Not just yet,” said Wesson. “I think I’ll look the place over first.”

  He turned away. That seemed to end the conversation as far as the network was concerned. A good thing; it was all right to have it for company, speaking when spoken to, but if it got talkative…

  The human part of the Station was in four segments: bedroom, living room, dining room, bath. The living room was comfortably large and pleasantly furnished in greens and tans; the only mechanical note in it was the big instrument console in one corner. The other rooms, arranged in a ring around the living room, were tiny; just space enough for Wesson, a narrow encircling corridor, and the mechanisms that would serve him. The whole place was spotlessly clean, gleaming and efficient in spite of its twenty-year layoff.

  This is the gravy part of the run, Wesson told himself. The month before the alien came—good food, no work, and an alpha network for conversation. “Aunt Jane, I’ll have a small steak now,” he said to the network. “Medium rare, with hashed brown potatoes, onions and mushrooms, and a glass of lager. Call me when it’s ready.”

  “Right,” said the voice pleasantly. Out in the dining room, the autochef began to hum and cluck self-importantly. Wesson wandered over and inspected the instrument console. Air locks were sealed and tight, said the dials; the air was cycling. The station was in orbit and rotating on its axis with a force at the perimeter, where Wesson was, of one g. The internal temperature of this part of the Station was an even 73°.

  The other side of the board told a different story; all the dials were dark and dead. Sector Two, occupying a volume some eighty-eight thousand tunes as great as this one, was not yet functioning.

  Wesson had a vivid mental image of the Station, from photographs and diagrams—a five-hundred-foot Duralumin sphere, onto which the shallow thirty-foot disk of the human section had been stuck apparently as an afterthought. The whole cavity of the sphere, very nearly—except for a honeycomb of supply and maintenance rooms and the all-important, recently enlarged vats—was one cramped chamber for the alien…

  “Steak’s ready!” said Aunt Jane.

  The steak was good, bubbling crisp outside the way he liked it, tender and pink inside. “Aunt Jane,” he said with his mouth full, “this is pretty soft, isn’t it?”

  “The steak?” asked the voice, with a family anxious note.

  Wesson grinned. “Never mind,” he said. “Listen, Aunt Jane, you’ve been through this routine—how many times? Were you installed with the Station, or what?”

  “I was not installed with the Station,” said Aunt Jane primly. “I have assisted at three contacts.”

  “Um. Cigarette,” said Wesson, slapping his pockets. The autochef hummed for a moment, and popped a pack of G. I.’s out of a vent. Wesson lighted up. “All right,” he said, “you’ve been through this three times. There are a lot of things you can tell me, right?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly. What would you like to know?”

  Wesson smoked, leaning back reflectively, green eyes narrowed. “First,” he said, “read me the Pigeon report—you know, from the Brief History. I want to see if I remember it right.”

  “Chapter Two,” said the voice promptly. “First contact with a non-Solar intelligence was made by Commander Ralph C. Pigeon on July 1, 1987, during an emergency landing on Titan. The following is an excerpt from his official report:

  “ ‘While searching for a possible cause for our mental disturbance, we discovered what appeared to be a gigantic construction of metal on the far side of the ridge. Our distress grew stronger with the approach to this construction, which was polyhedral and approximately five times the length of the Cologne.

  “ ‘Some of those present expressed a wish to retire, but Lt. Acuff and myself had a strong sense of being called or summoned in some indefinable way. Although our uneasiness was not lessened, we therefore agreed to go forward and keep radio contact with the rest of the party while they returned to the ship.

  “ ‘We gained access to the alien construction by way of a large, irregular opening… The internal temperature was minus seventy-five degrees
Fahrenheit; the atmosphere appeared to consist of methane and ammonia… Inside the second chamber, an alien creature was waiting for us. We felt the distress, which I have tried to describe, to a much greater degree than before, and also the sense of summoning or pleading… We observed that the creature was exuding a thick yellowish fluid from certain joints or pores in its surface. Though disgusted, I managed to collect a sample of this exudate, and it was later forwarded for analysis…’

  “The second contact was made ten years later by Commodore Crawford’s famous Titan Expedition—”

  “No, that’s enough,” said Wesson. “I just wanted the Pigeon quote.” He smoked, brooding. “It seems kind of chopped off, doesn’t it? Have you got a longer version in your memory banks anywhere?”

  There was a pause. “No,” said Aunt Jane.

  ’There was more -to it when I was a kid,” Wesson complained nervously. “I read that book when I was twelve, and I remember a long description of the alien—that is, I remember its being there.” He swung around. “Listen, Aunt Jane—you’re a sort of universal watchdog, that right? You’ve got cameras and mikes all over the Station?”

  “Yes,” said the network, sounding—was it Wesson’s imagination?—faintly injured.

  “Well, what about Sector Two? You must have cameras up there, too, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then you can tell me. What do the aliens look like?”

  There was a definite pause. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that,” said Aunt Jane.

  “No,” said Wesson, “I didn’t think you could. You’ve got orders not to, I guess, for the same reason those history books have been cut since I was a kid. Now, what would the reason be? Have you got any idea, Aunt Jane?”

  There was another pause. “Yes,” the voice admitted.

  “Well?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t—”

  “—tell you that,” Wesson repeated along with it. “All right. At least we know where we stand.”

  “Yes, Sergeant. Would you like some dessert?”

  “No dessert. One other thing. What happens to Station watchmen, like me, after their tour of duty?”

  “They are upgraded to Class Seven, students with unlimited leisure, and receive outright gifts of seven thousand stellors, plus free Class One housing…”

  “Yeah, I know all that,” said Wesson, licking his dry lips. “But here’s what I’m asking you. The ones you know—what kind of shape were they in when they left here?”

  “The usual human shape,” said the voice brightly. “Why do you ask, Sergeant?”

  Wesson made a discontented gesture. “Something I remember from a bull session at the Academy. I can’t get it out of my head; I know it had something to do with the Station. Just a part of a sentence: ‘…blind as a bat and white bristles all over…’ Now, would that be a description of the alien—or the watchman when they came to take him away?”

  Aunt Jane went into one of her heavy pauses. “All right, I’ll save you the trouble,” said Wesson. “You’re sorry, you can’t tell me that.”

  “I am sorry,” said the robot sincerely.

  As the slow days passed into weeks, Wesson grew aware of the Station almost as a living thing. He could feel its resilient metal ribs enclosing him, lightly bearing his weight with its own as it swung. He could feel the waiting emptiness “up there,” and he sensed the alert electronic network that spread around him everywhere, watching and probing, trying to anticipate his needs.

  Aunt Jane was a model companion. She had a record library of thousands of hours of music; she had films to show him, and microprinted books that he could read on the scanner in the living room; or if he preferred, she would read to him. She controlled the Station’s three telescopes, and on request would give him a view of Earth or the Moon or Home…

  But there was no news. Aunt Jane would obligingly turn on the radio receiver if he asked her, but nothing except static came out. That was the thing that weighed most heavily on Wesson, as time passed—the knowledge that radio silence was being imposed on all ships in transit, on the orbital stations, and on the planet-to-space transmitters. It was an enormous, almost a crippling handicap. Some information could be transmitted over relatively short distances by photophone, but ordinarily the whole complex traffic of the space lanes depended on radio.

  But this coming alien contact was so delicate a thing that even a radio voice, out here where the Earth was only a tiny disk twice the size of the Moon, might upset it. It was so precarious a thing, Wesson thought, that only one man could be allowed in the Station while the alien was there, and to give that man the company that would keep him sane, they had to install an alpha network…

  “Aunt Jane?”

  The voice answered promptly, “Yes, Paul.”

  “This distress that the books talk about—you wouldn’t know what it is, would you?”

  “No, Paul.”

  “Because robot brains don’t feel it, right?”

  “Right, Paul.”

  “So tell me this—why do they need a man here at all? Why can’t they get along with just you?”

  A pause. “I don’t know, Paul.” The voice sounded faintly wistful. Were those gradations of tone really in it, Wesson wondered, or was his imagination supplying them?

  He got up from the living room couch and paced restlessly back and forth. “Let’s have a look at Earth,” he said. Obediently, the viewing screen on the console glowed into life: there was the blue Earth, swimming deep below him, in its first quarter, jewel bright. “Switch it off,” Wesson said.

  “A little music?” suggested the voice, and immediately began to play something soothing, full of woodwinds.

  “No,” said Wesson. The music stopped.

  Wesson’s hands were trembling; he had a caged and frustrated feeling.

  The fitted suit was in its locker beside the air lock. Wesson had been topside in it once or twice; there was nothing to see up there, just darkness and cold. But he had to get out of this squirrel cage. He took the suit down and began to get into it.

  “Paul,” said Aunt Jane anxiously, “are you feeling nervous?”

  “Yes,” he snarled.

  ’Then don’t go into Sector Two,” said Aunt Jane.

  “Don’t tell me what to do, you hunk of tin!” said Wesson with sudden anger. He zipped up the front of his suit with a vicious motion.

  Aunt Jane was silent.

  Seething, Wesson finished his check-off and opened the lock door.

  The air lock, an upright tube barely large enough for one man, was the only passage between Sector One and Sector Two. It was also the only exit from Sector One; to get here in the first place, Wesson had had to enter the big lock at the “south” pole of the sphere, and travel all the way down inside, by drop hole and catwalk. He had been drugged unconscious at the time, of course. When the time came, he would go out the same way; neither the maintenance rocket nor the tanker had any space, or time, to spare.

  At the “north” pole, opposite, there was a third air lock, this one so huge it could easily have held an interplanetary freighter. But that was nobody’s business—no human being’s.

  In the beam of Wesson’s helmet lamp, the enormous central cavity of the Station was an inky gulf that sent back only remote, mocking glimmers of light. The near walls sparkled with hoarfrost. Sector Two was not yet pressurized; there was only a diffuse vapor that had leaked through the airseal and had long since frozen into the powdery deposit that lined the walls. The metal rang cold under his shod feet; the vast emptiness of the chamber was the more depressing because it-was airless, unwarmed and unlit. Alone, said his footsteps; alone…

  He was thirty yards up the catwalk when his anxiety suddenly grew stronger. Wesson stopped in spite of himself and turned clumsily, putting his back to the wall. The support of the solid wall was not enough. The catwalk seemed threatening to tilt underfoot, dropping Mm into the lightless gulf.

  Wesson recog
nized this drained feeling, this metallic taste at the back of his tongue. It was fear.

  The thought ticked through his head: They want me to be afraid. But why? Why now? Of what?

  Equally suddenly, he knew. The nameless pressure tightened, like a great fist closing, and Wesson had the appalling sense of something so huge that it had no limits at all, descending, with a terrible endless swift slowness…

  It was time.

  His first month was up.

  The alien was coming.

  As Wesson turned, gasping, the whole huge structure of the Station around him seemed to dwindle to the size of an ordinary room—and Wesson with it, so that he seemed to himself like a tiny insect, frantically scuttling down the walls toward safety.

  Behind him as he ran, the Station boomed.

  In the silent rooms, all the lights were burning dimly. Wesson lay still, looking at the ceiling. Up there his imagination formed a shifting, changing image of the alien—huge, shadowy, formlessly menacing.

  Sweat had gathered in globules on his brow. He stared, unable to look away.

  “That was why you didn’t want me to go topside, huh, Aunt Jane?” he said hoarsely.

  “Yes. The nervousness is the first sign. But you gave me a direct order, Paul.”

  “I know it,” he said vaguely, still staring fixedly at the ceiling. “A funny thing… Aunt Jane?”

  “Yes, Paul?”

  “You won’t tell me what it looks like, right?”

  “No, Paul.”

  “I don’t want to know. Ix›rd, I don’t want to know… Funny thing, Aunt Jane, part of me is just pure funk—I’m so scared I’m nothing but a jelly.”

  “I know,” said the voice gently.

  “—And part is real cool and calm, as if it didn’t matter. Crazy, the things you think about. You know?”

  “What things, Paul?”

  He tried to laugh. “I’m remembering a kids’ party I went to twenty, twenty-five years ago. I was—let’s see—I was nine. I remember, because that was the same year my father died.