Stranger Station Read online

  “We were living in Dallas then, in a rented mobile house, and there was a family in the next tract with a bunch of redheaded kids. They were always throwing parties; nobody liked them much, but everybody always went.”

  “Tell me about the party, Paul.”

  He shifted on the couch. “This one—this one was a Halloween party. I remember the girls had on black and orange dresses, and the boys mostly wore spirit costumes. I was about the youngest kid there, and I felt kind of out of place. Then all of a sudden one of the redheads jumps up in a skull mask, hollering, ‘C’mon, everybody get ready for hide-and-seek.’ And he grabs me, and says, ‘You be it,’ and before I can even move, he shoves me into a dark closet. And I hear that door lock behind me.”

  He moistened his lips. “And then—you know, in the darkness—I feel something hit my face. You know, cold and clammy, like—I don’t know—something dead…

  “I just hunched up on the floor of that closet, waiting for that thing to touch me again. You know? That thing, cold and kind of gritty, hanging up there. You know what it was? A cloth glove, full of ice and bran cereal. A joke. Boy, that was one joke I never forgot… Aunt Jane?”

  “Yes, Paul.”

  “Hey, I’ll bet you alpha networks made great psychs, huh? I could lie here and tell you anything, because you’re just a machine—right?”

  “Right, Paul,” said the network sorrowfully.

  “Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane… It’s no use kidding myself along. I can feel that thing up there, just a couple of yards away.”

  “I know you can, Paul.”

  “I can’t stand it, Aunt Jane.”

  “You can if you think you can, Paul.”

  He writhed on the couch. “It’s—it’s dirty, it’s clammy. My God, is it going to be like that for five months? I can’t, it’ll kill me, Aunt Jane.!’

  There was another thunderous boom, echoing down through the structural members of the Station. “What’s that?” Wesson gasped. “The other ship—casting off?”

  “Yes. Now he’s alone, just as you are.”

  “Not like me. He can’t be feeling what I’m feeling. Aunt Jane, you don’t know…”

  Up there, separated from him only by a few yards of metal, the alien’s enormous, monstrous body hung. It was that poised weight, as real as if he could touch it, that weighed down his chest.

  Wesson had been a space dweller for most of his adult life and knew even in his bones that, if an orbital station ever collapsed, the “under” part would not be crushed but would be hurled away by its own angular momentum. This was not the oppressiveness of planetside buildings, where the looming mass above you seemed always threatening to fall. This was something else, completely distinct, and impossible to argue away.

  It was the scent of danger, hanging unseen up there in the dark, waiting, cold and heavy. It was the recurrent nightmare of Wesson’s childhood—the bloated unreal shape, no-color, no-size, that kept on hideously falling toward his face… It was the dead puppy he had pulled out of the creek, that summer in Dakota—wet fur, limp head, cold, cold, cold…

  With an effort, Wesson rolled over on the couch and lifted himself to one elbow. The pressure was an insistent chill weight on his skull; the room seemed to dip and swing around him in slow, dizzy circles.

  Wesson felt his jaw muscles contorting with the strain as he knelt, then stood erect. His back and legs tightened; his mouth hung painfully open. He took one step, then another, timing them to hit the floor as it came upright.

  The right side of the console, the one that had been dark, was lighted. Pressure in Sector Two, according to the indicator, was about one and a third atmospheres. The air-lock indicator showed a slightly higher pressure of oxygen and argon; that was to keep any of the alien atmosphere from contaminating Sector One, but it also meant that the lock would no longer open from either side. Wesson found that irrationally comforting.

  “Lemme see Earth,” he gasped.

  The screen lighted up as he stared into it. “It’s a long way down,” he said. A long, long way down to the bottom of that well… He had spent ten featureless years as a servo tech in Home Station. Before that, he’d wanted to be a pilot, but had washed out the first year—couldn’t take the math. But he had never once thought of going back to Earth.

  Now, suddenly, after all these years, that tiny blue disk seemed infinitely desirable.

  “Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane, it’s beautiful,” he mumbled.

  Down there, he knew, it was spring; and in certain places, where the edge of darkness retreated, it was morning—a watery blue morning like the sea light caught in an agate, a morning with smoke and mist in it, a morning of stillness and promise. Down there, lost years and miles away, some tiny dot of a woman was opening her microscopic door to listen to an atom’s song. Lost, lost, and packed away in cotton wool, like a specimen slide—one spring morning on Earth.

  Black miles above, so far that sixty Earths could have been piled one on another to make a pole for his perch, Wesson swung in his endless circle within a circle. Yet, vast as the gulf beneath him was, all this—Earth, Moon, orbital stations, ships; yes, the Sun and all the rest of his planets, too—was the merest sniff of space, to be pinched up between thumb and finger.

  Beyond—there was the true gulf. In that deep night, galaxies lay sprawled aglitter, piercing a distance that could only be named in a meaningless number, a cry of dismay: O… O… O…

  Crawling and fighting, blasting with energies too big for them, men had come as far as Jupiter. But if a man had been tall enough to lie with his boots toasting in the Sun and his head freezing at Pluto, still he would have been too small for that overwhelming emptiness. Here, not at Pluto, was the outermost limit of man’s empire; here the Outside tunneled down to meet it, like the pinched waist of an hourglass; here, and only here, the two worlds came near enough to touch. Ours—and Theirs.

  Down at the bottom of the board, now, the golden dials were faintly alight, the needles trembling ever so little on their pins.

  Deep in the vats, the vats, the golden liquid was trickling down: “Though disgusted, I took a sample of the exudate, and it was forwarded for analysis…”

  Space-cold fluid, trickling down the bitter walls of the tubes, forming little pools in the cups of darkness; goldenly agleam there, half alive. The golden elixir. One drop of the concentrate would arrest aging for twenty years—keep your arteries soft, tonus good, eyes clear, hair pigmented, brain alert.

  That was what the tests of Pigeon’s sample had showed. That was the reason for the whole crazy history of the “alien trading post”—first a hut on Titan, then later, when people understood more about the problem, Stranger Station.

  Once every twenty years, an alien would come down out of Somewhere, and sit in the tiny cage we had made for him, and make us rich beyond our dreams—rich with life—and still we did not know why.

  Above him, Wesson imagined he could see that sensed body awallow in the glacial blackness, its bulk passively turning with the Station’s spin, bleeding a chill gold into the lips of the tubes—drip… drop…

  Wesson held his head. The pressure inside made it hard to think; it felt as if his skull were about to fly apart. “Aunt Jane,” he said.

  “Yes, Paul.” The kindly, comforting voice, like a nurse. The nurse who stands beside your cot while you have painful, necessary things done to you. Efficient, trained friendliness.

  “Aunt Jane,” said Wesson, “do you know why they keep coming back?”

  “No,” said the voice precisely. “It is a mystery.”

  Wesson nodded. “I had,” he said, “an interview with Gower before I left Home. You know Gower? Chief of the Outer-world Bureau. Came up especially to see me.”

  “Yes?” said Aunt Jane encouragingly.

  “Said to me, Wesson, you got to find out. Find out if we can count on them to keep up the supply. You know? There’s fifty million more of us,’ he says,than when you were born. We need more of the stuff, and we
got to know if we can count on it. Because,’ he says, ‘you know what would happen if it stopped?’ Do you know, Aunt Jane?”

  “It would be,” said the voice, “a catastrophe.”

  “That’s right,” Wesson said respectfully. “It would. Like, he says to me, What if the people in the Nefud area were cut off from the Jordan Valley Authority? Why, there’d be millions dying of thirst in a week.

  “ ‘Or what if the freighters stopped coming to Moon Base? Why,’ he says, ‘there’d be thousands starving and smothering to death.’

  “He says, ‘Where the water is, where you can get food and air, people are going to settle and get married, you know? And have kids.

  “He says, ‘If the so-called longevity serum stopped coming…’ Says, ‘Every twentieth adult in the Sol family is due for his shot this year.’ Says, ‘Of those, almost twenty percent are one hundred fifteen or older.’ Says, ‘The deaths in that group in the first year would be at least three times what the actuarial tables call for.’ ” Wesson raised a strained face.

  “I’m thirty-four, you know?” he said. “That Gower, he made me feel like a baby.”

  Aunt Jane made a sympathetic noise.

  “Drip, drip,” said Wesson hysterically. The needles of the tall golden indicators were infinitesimally higher. “Every twenty years we need more of the stuff, so somebody like me has to come out and take it for five lousy months. And one of them has to come out and sit there, and drip. Why, Aunt Jane? What for? Why should it matter to them whether we live a long time or not? Why do they keep on coming back? What do they take away from here?”

  But to these questions, Aunt Jane had no reply.

  All day and every day, the lights burned cold and steady in the circular gray corridor around the rim of Sector One. The hard gray flooring had been deeply scuffed in that circular path before Wesson ever walked there—the corridor existed for that only, like a treadmill in a squirrel cage. It said “Walk,” and Wesson walked. A man would go crazy if he sat still, with that squirming, indescribable pressure on his head; and so Wesson paced off the miles, all day and every day, until he dropped like a dead man in the bed at night.

  He talked, too, sometimes to himself, sometimes to the listening alpha network; sometimes it was difficult to tell which. “Moss on a rock,” he muttered, pacing. “Told him, wouldn’t give twenty mills for any shell… Little pebbles down there, all colors.” He shuffled on in silence for a while. Abruptly: “I don’t see why they couldn’t have given me a cat.”

  Aunt Jane said nothing. After a moment Wesson went on, “Nearly everybody at Home has a cat, for God’s sake, or a goldfish or something. You’re all right, Aunt Jane, but I can’t see you. My God, I mean if they couldn’t send a man a woman for company—what I mean, my God, I never liked cats.” He swung around the doorway into the bedroom, and absentmindedly slammed his fist into the bloody place on the wall.

  “But a cat would have been something,” he said.

  Aunt Jane was still silent.

  “Don’t pretend your feelings are hurt. I know you, you’re only a machine,” said Wesson. “Listen, Aunt Jane, I remember a cereal package one time that had a horse and a cowboy on the side. There wasn’t much room, so about all you saw was their faces. It used to strike me funny how much they looked alike. Two ears on the top with hair in the middle. Two eyes. Nose. Mouth with teeth in it. I was thinking, we’re kind of distant cousins, aren’t we, us and the horses. But compared to that thing up there—we’re brothers. You know?”

  “Yes,” said Aunt Jane quietly.

  “So I keep asking myself, why couldn’t they have sent a horse or a cat instead of a man? But I guess the answer is because only a man could take what I’m taking. God, only a man. Right?”

  “Right,” said Aunt Jane with deep sorrow.

  Wesson stopped at the bedroom doorway again and shuddered, holding onto the frame. “Aunt Jane,” he said in a low, clear voice, “you take pictures of him up there, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Paul.”

  “And you take pictures of me. And then what happens? After it’s all over, who looks at the pictures?”

  “I don’t know,” said Aunt Jane humbly.

  “You don’t know. But whoever looks at ’em, it doesn’t do any good. Right? We got to find out why, why, why… And we never do find out, do we?”

  “No,” said Aunt Jane.

  “But don’t they figure that if the man who’s going through it could see him, he might be able to tell something? That other people couldn’t? Doesn’t that make sense?”

  “That’s out of my hands, Paul.”

  He sniggered. “That’s funny. Oh, that’s funny.” He chortled in his throat, reeling around the circuit.

  “Yes, that’s funny,” said Aunt Jane.

  “Aunt Jane, tell me what happens to the watchmen.”

  “I can’t tell you that, Paul.”

  He lurched into the living room, sat down before the console, beat on its smooth, cold metal with his fists. “What are you, some kind of monster? Isn’t there any blood in your veins, or oil or anything?”

  “Please, Paul—”

  “Don’t you see, all I want to know, can they talk? Can they tell anything after their tour is over?”

  “No, Paul.”

  He stood upright, clutching the console for balance. “They can’t? No, I figured. And you know why?”

  “No.”

  “Up there,” said Wesson obscurely. “Moss on the rock.”

  “Paul, what?”

  “We get changed,” said Wesson, stumbling out of the room again. “We get changed. Like a piece of iron next to a magnet. Can’t help it. You—nonmagnetic, I guess. Goes right through you, huh, Aunt Jane? You don’t get changed. You stay here, wait for the next one.”

  “Yes,” said Aunt Jane.

  “You know,” said Wesson, pacing, “I can tell how he’s lying up there. Head that way, tail the other. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” said Aunt Jane.

  Wesson stopped. “Yes,” he said intently. “So you can tell me what you see up there, can’t you, Aunt Jane?”

  “No. Yes. It isn’t allowed.”

  “Listen, Aunt Jane, we’ll die unless we can find out what makes those aliens tick! Remember that.”

  Wesson leaned against the corridor wall, gazing up. “He’s turning now—around this way. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what else is he doing? Come on, Aunt Jane, tell me!”

  A pause. “He is twitching his—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know the words.”

  “My God, my God,” said Wesson, clutching his head, “of course there aren’t any words.” He ran into the living room, clutched the console, and stared at the blank screen. He pounded the metal with his fist. “You’ve got to show me, Aunt Jane, come on and show me—show me!”

  “It isn’t allowed,” Aunt Jane protested.

  “You’ve got to do it just the same, or we’ll die, Aunt Jane—millions of us, billions, and it’ll be your fault, get it? Your fault, Aunt Jane!”

  “Please,” said the voice. There was a pause. The screen flickered to life, for an instant only. Wesson had a glimpse of something massive and dark, but half transparent, like a magnified insect—a tangle of nameless limbs, whiplike filaments, claws, wings…

  He clutched the edge of the console.

  “Was that all right?” Aunt Jane asked.

  “Of course! What do you think, it’ll kill me to look at it? Put it back, Aunt Jane, put it back!”

  Reluctantly, the screen lighted again. Wesson stared and went on staring. He mumbled something.

  “What?” said Aunt Jane.

  “Life of my love, I loathe thee,” said Wesson, staring. He roused himself after a moment and turned away. The image of the alien stayed with him as he went reeling into the corridor again; he was not surprised to find that it reminded him of all the loathsome, crawling, creeping things the Earth was full o
f. That explained why he was not supposed to see the alien, or even know what it looked like—because that fed his hate. And it was all right for him to be afraid of the alien, but he was not supposed to hate it… Why not? Why not?

  His fingers were shaking. He felt drained, steamed, dried up and withered. The one daily shower Aunt Jane allowed him was no longer enough. Twenty minutes after bathing the acid sweat dripped again from his armpits, the cold sweat was beaded on his forehead, the hot sweat was in his palms. Wesson felt as if there were a furnace inside him, out of control, all the dampers drawn. He knew that, under stress, something of the kind did happen to a man; the body’s chemistry was altered—more adrenalin, more glycogen in the muscles, eyes brighter, digestion retarded. That was the trouble—he was burning himself up, unable to fight the thing that tormented him, nor run from it.

  After another circuit, Wesson’s steps faltered. He hesitated, and went into the living room. He leaned over the console, staring. From the screen, the alien stared blindly up into space. Down in the dark side, the golden indicators had climbed: the vats were more than two thirds filled.

  To fight or run …

  Slowly Wesson sank down in front of the console. He sat hunched, head bent, hands squeezed tight between his knees, trying to hold onto the thought that had come to him.

  If the alien felt a pain as great as Wesson’s—or greater—

  Stress might alter the alien’s body chemistry, too.

  Life of my love, I loathe thee.

  Wesson pushed the Irrelevant thought aside. He stared at the screen, trying to envisage the alien up there, wincing in pain and distress—sweating a golden sweat of horror…

  After a long time, he stood up and walked into the kitchen. He caught the table edge to keep his legs from carrying him on around the circuit. He sat down.

  Humming fondly, the autochef slid out a tray of small glasses—water, orange juice, milk. Wesson put the water glass to his stiff lips; the water was cool and hurt his throat. Then the juice, but he could drink only a little of it; then he sipped the milk. Aunt Jane hummed approvingly.

  Dehydrated. How long had it been since he had eaten or drunk? He looked at his hands. They were thin bundles of sticks, ropy-veined, with hard yellow claws. He could see the bones of his forearms under the skin, and his heart’s beating stirred the cloth at his chest. The pale hairs on his arms and thighs—were they blond or white?