Free Selected Stories by Theodore Sturgeon Page B

not look at Teague, and wished with all his heart that Teague had been alone to hear that ghostly voice. As to what it had said, the words stood as a frame for a picture he could not see, showing him only where it was, not what it meant. Alma’s voice had been tremulous and unsure, but he knew it well enough to know that joy and certitude had lived with her as she spoke. There was wonderment, but no fear.
    Knowing that it might be her only message to them, should she not have told them more—facts, figures, measurements?
    Then an old, old tale flashed into his mind, an early thing from the ancient Amerenglish, by Hynlen (Henlyne, was it? no matter) about a man who tried to convey to humanity a description of the superbeings who had captured him, with only his body as a tablet and his nails as a stylus. Perhaps he was mad by the time he finished, but his message was clear at least to him: “Creation took eight days.” How would he, Tod, describe an association with the ones he had seen in the sky outside, if he had been with them for nearly three hundred days?
    April tugged gently at his arm. He turned toward her, still avoiding the sight of Teague. April inclined her shining white head to the door. Moira and Carl already stood outside. They joined them, and waited wordlessly until Teague came out.
    When he did, he was grateful, and he need not say so. He came out, a great calm in his face and voice, passed them and let them follow him to his methodical examination of the other compartments, to finish his inventory.
    Food stores, cable and conduit, metal and parametal rod and sheet stock, tools and tool-making matrices and dies. A hangar, in which lay their lifeboat, fully equipped.
    But there was no long-range communication device, and no parts for one.
    And there was no heavy space-drive mechanism, nor tools to make one, nor fuel if they should make the tools.
    Back in the instrument room, Carl grunted. “Somebody means for us to stick around.”
    “The boat—”
    Teague said, “I don’t think they’d have left us the boat if Earth was in range.”
    “We’ll build a beacon,” Tod said suddenly. “We’ll get a rescue ship out to us.”
    “Out where?” asked Teague drily.
    They followed his gaze. Bland and silent, merciless, the decay chronometer stared back at them. Built around a standard radioactive, it had two dials—one which measured the amount of energy radiated by the material, and one which measured the lost mass. When they checked, the reading was correct. They checked, and the reading was 64.
    “Sixty-four years,” said Teague. “Assuming we averaged as much as one-half light speed, which isn’t likely, we must be thirty light-years away from Earth. Thirty years to get a light-beam there, sixty or more to get a ship back, plus time to make the beacon and time for Earth to understand the signal and prepare a ship. …” He shook his head.
    “Plus the fact,” Tod said in a strained voice, “that there is no habitable planet in a thirty-year radius from Sol. Except Prime.”
    Shocked, they gaped silently at this well-known fact. A thousand years of scrupulous search with the best instruments could not have missed a planet like this at such a distance.
    “Then the chronometer’s wrong!”
    “I’m afraid not,” said Teague. “It’s sixty-four years since we left Earth, and that’s that.”
    “And this planet doesn’t exist,” said Carl with a sour smile, “and I suppose that is also that.”
    “Yes, Teague,” said Tod. “One of these two facts can’t exist with the other.”
    “They can because they do,” said Teague. “There’s a missing factor. Can a man breathe under water, Tod?”
    “If he has a diving-helmet.”
    Teague spread his hands. “It took sixty-four years to get to this planet if. We have to find the figurative diving-helmet.” He paused. “The evidence in favor of the planet’s existence is fairly impressive,” he said wryly. “Let’s check the other