The Portable Star Read online

  The four space voyagers ate without appetite, and sat helplessly about the clutter of the meal.

  After awhile Philip said, “They are energy creatures, as Grace said. Blasting the soil in which they dress themselves is like tearing a man’s shirt. He can always get another one.” He paused thoughtfully, before he said, “If we could only attack their minds directly!”

  “How?” grumbled Holdeh.

  “There’s such a thing as psychology,” Philip reminded.

  “Yes, but what do we know about their psychology?” demanded Celestine.

  “Nothing.” Philip shrugged. “I grant that. But they’re intelligent. They must have emotions or they wouldn’t enjoy playing with ours. They can frighten us. Suppose we could frighten them. They’re only children, if Grace’s intuition is right.”

  “The blaster didn’t frighten them,” said Holden.

  “They knew it wouldn’t kill them,” Philip pointed out, “so there was nothing to be afraid of. They’d fear death, I suppose, but how do you go about killing energy beings? Now what else would they fear? Pain? Loss of security? Loss of loved ones?”

  “Ghosts, too,” added Celestine, disagreeably. “Have you thought they might be afraid of them?”

  Philip looked at her with his eyebrows raised in approval. “You’re right!” he exclaimed. “The unknown! Any creature is afraid of what it doesn’t understand, of something outside its experience.”

  Holden said, “The ship is outside their experience. They’re not afraid of it. I’m sorry to say.”

  “The ship is just another form of matter,” said Philip, “and we’re just another form of mind wrapped in matter.” He looked thoughtfully out at the mounds, just barely seen now in the dimming light. And he said musingly, “Now what wouldn’t they understand?”

  Grace said dreamily, “The sun, the unclouded sky, the stars. They’ve never seen any of those.”

  “I dare say you’re right,” said Celestine. “But we can’t bring the stars down to them, so that’s no good. Stars aren’t portable.”

  Grace rose to her feet. Her face suddenly looked dreamier than ever. Her lips were parted. She moved slowly to Holden and deposited herself on his lap with a gesture that was almost abandon. She lifted her face to his with a slow smile. When she spoke her words were slurred.

  “Ta’ me t’bed, Hol’n. I feel so fun-neeeee.” She put her cheek against his and giggled.

  Holden reddened, and said protestingly, “Now. Grace—”

  Grace tossed her head back and looked at Philip and Celestine upside down. She said. “W’rried ’bout them, are you? J’st a pair o’—”

  At the accusation that followed, Philip’s eyes opened wide, but Celestine only said, with dry amusement, “Why, the little she-devil!”

  Holden got to his feet in confusion, holding his wife desperately, while she squirmed against his body in a manner to make her meaning and emotion unmistakable.

  “They’re making her do this,” he muttered. “I—I’d better take her away.

  It was half an hour before he reappeared.

  He said. “She’s herself now, but she’s —got a headache. She’s embarrassed about what happened, how she acted in here. You won’t mention it to her, will you?”

  Celestine shrugged. “Nothing she said or did shocked us.”

  Holden said miserably, “How can we stop it all? If we just sit here and let them poke our minds here and there, we’ll find ourselves killing each other or doing other terrible things.”

  Two hours later Holden, in gruesome proof that he had been prophetic, had invaded the Van Horne cabin to claim Celestine, and had nearly killed Philip in the process.

  * * *

  Now he was gone again, and Philip sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on wide-spread knees, fingers intertwined loosely, his face dazed and unhappy.

  Celestine said, with abruptness, “Well, there’s no use brooding about it. It couldn’t be helped. Do you want a sleeping pill?”

  Philip looked up, and when he spoke it was not exactly complimentary to her. He wasn’t even thinking about Celestine. What he said was:

  “A portable star.”

  “What?” His wife stared at him.

  “Something you said earlier,” he said. “A portable star. It might work.” He stood up. His hands balled into fists and he moved about restlessly. “We can’t just let things go on, can we?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Philip didn’t answer. He just tore out of the cabin and on into the engine room. With feverish, inspired haste, he dismantled the water recirculator and removed the gas cylinders. Cautiously he twisted the hoses together, clamped them into position with wire from the electrical stock supply drawer and fitted an Elgin tube of transparent quartz over the combined nozzles. Turning again to the water recirculator he loosened the pencil-thin catalyst-chamber, squinted a moment at the spongy platinum-black it contained, and slipped it in his pocket.

  He moved back into the common room and pulled his own space-suit from its rack. The other three in the party were waiting for him—Holden, with a hangdog look on his face, and his eyes sliding away from direct contact; Grace, pale and scrubbed-looking, as though fresh from a sponge bath; and Celestine, wearing new makeup, though it showed traces of an unsteady hand in the application.

  Celestine asked Philip, “Are you leaving the ship?”

  “That’s right,” he told her grimly. “Help me with this, Holden.”

  Holden lifted the cylinders onto the back of the suit, strapped them in place just next to the oxygen cylinder that would supply Philip’s respiratory needs. He passed the two hoses over Philip’s head.

  Philip shifted the catalyst-chamber from his trousers pocket to the pocket in his space-suit. He dipped his finger into a glass of water and ran it around the inner surface of the quartz jacket he had drawn over the twinned hoses.

  Celestine began, “What do we do for water if you—” and let her question fade into silence.

  “Take care of yourself, Philip,” Grace said uncertainly.

  “Thanks,” he said tightly. He placed the helmet over his head.

  Once outside the ship, Philip Van Horne felt cut off from all things human. He had polarized all ports to full opacity before leaving the ship, and now no spark of light invaded the solid blackness all about.

  Slowly he moved away from the ship, bucking the steady wind. Hearing its whistle against his suit was the only sensation he could recognize. Dimly he sensed the natives, curious, waiting for him.

  He halted and cracked open the gauges to both cylinders. When he felt the gentle push of gas within the quartz jacket he put his gauntleted hand over it.

  He lifted the nozzles. They could see him, he hoped, or could sense him by whatever method it was they used. A sudden thought chilled him. What if they lacked the sense of sight, or any sense corresponding to it? Desperately he refused to think of such a thing. They had to be sentient!

  He raised the catalyst-chamber toward the open top of the quartz jacket. For a single moment, he was furiously certain that this would do the trick. But only for a moment. He paused, hands lifted halfway. Could anything work so simply, after all? To try, to fail, to have to return to the ship to report failure—

  His hand moved, stopped again. Swift thoughts came.

  The creatures—call them that—were emotion-controllers. Was the doubt of his success his own? For a moment he had been certain, and then—

  Had the triumph he had felt spilled over too openly? Were they now canceling it out in their own way?

  Once more, half-heartedly, he made a tentative gesture of raising the catalyst chamber, and instantly depression hit him, as dark as the night that surrounded him. It would not work. How could it?

  And that thought decided him. The depression had come too quickly, too patly. It had not come from his own mind, but from theirs. He could fight it now, and he did.

  He fought the despair, fought his own apparent knowledg
e of inevitable failure. Closing his mind to what was trying to seem to be bitter certainty, he lunged at the quartz tube with its leaking gases swirling upward.

  He fought the fear that followed. But it grew until it became the same fear that had kept him from taking the controls of the ship. However, the ship’s controls were complicated. There were fifty motions involved, each with its fresh surcharge of fright. And here it was necessary only to touch one object to another.

  In the dark, he could not tell by sight how close chamber was to quartz except for the position of his arms. But he knew there must be only inches left. He compressed those inches, and his forehead slicked with perspiration.

  He fought with what remained of his untouched mind, and momentarily felt the dim contact of metal against quartz. Contact broke off immediately in a perfect agony of despair, but that one moment had sufficed. The moisture he had introduced within the quartz was a second catalyst, and between the effect of powdered platinum and water traces the hydrogen and oxygen combined in chemical action and burst into flame.

  Pale blue, dancing in the residuum of dusty air that blew into the jacket from he the open end, it sparked in his hand like a star, twinkling and shifting tirelessly.

  And the aliens were gone!

  Philip could now see that. Out here it has been as black as tar before. It was as black as tar now, except for the dim blue star in his hand. But there was a lightness in Philip Van Horne’s mind that was clear enough in the information it gave him. The touch of the aliens had been so constant a factor for over two full days that, with it removed, it was as though a boulder had been heaved from his crushed body, leaving him free to stand once more.

  He called into his radio, “Holden! Holden! Get to those controls!”

  Turning, he ran back to the ship as fast as he could pump his encased legs… .

  * * *

  The two men were at the controls. The two women were asleep.

  At last Philip had a chance to explain more in detail to Holden, who still couldn’t seem to take it all in.

  “It wasn’t just light,” Philip was saying. “They knew what light was, from the steady gray illumination of their cloudy skies. The illumination may have been whiter, but they recognized it for what it was. To them, it was still just a piece of their sky that had come down to the surface. Flame was something else again.

  Holden shook his head, “I still don’t see why.”

  “It was blue light that flickered and shifted, and could be carried about. That was the main point. It was light that could be held in the hand. It was a portable star, and not just featureless light in the sky or from a ship. Remember flame can’t exist on this world of theirs with its atmosphere of nitrogen, argon, and sand. In millions of years nothing could possibly have burned on Sigmaringen IV until I got the compressed hydrogen and oxygen from the water recirculator and let them burn in one another. The aliens were faced with the unknown, the incomprehensible. They were only children, after all, and they ran.”

  Around the space-ship now was the comforting blackness and emptiness of space; the friendliness of the stars.

  Holden sighed deeply. “Well, we’ll be Jumping soon, and then we’ll just be a day or two outside Earth. We can report these energy creatures, only … Phil?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no point in telling what happened to us.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Let’s just forget it all. It was mental control. It’s better to forget.”

  Philip said, “Much better.”

  His words rang hollowly in his own ears. Mental control or not, he would live with the memory of Celestine barring him from the door while Holden pursued him with clutching fingers; the memory of Celestine laughing wildly.

  Forget?

  In his mind, he could hear Celestine laughing and, quite uselessly, he put his hands over his ears.

  “What’s the matter?” said Holden.

  “Nothing,” Philip said drearily.