Night Dweller
(1965)
New Worlds SF, November 1965
Terry Pratchett
Space is an ocean. I remember that now as I watch the armada of blue Nisphers sailing down against the solar wind. They are heading for the sun, to bask safely in the golden shallows. Even they flee from the storm.
Besides the low sighing of the Nisphers there is only the ever-present hiss of space. No squeaks or squeals or grunts that mean the teeming life of the firmament itself. We are only just past the Pluto orbit and the Ear has been silent for days.
Donovan stands gazing out of t he forward vision-port, hands clasped tightly behind his back. He too is watching the billowing sails, and perhaps he too is thinking the same as I. In the corner the receiver of the Ear hisses quietly to itself the sound of the cosmos, like waves on a distant sea's shore.
I return to the log and continue with the report. But there is really nothing to report. Today--a ridiculous term out here but a necessary one--we have consumed eight tubes of concentrates and finished the seventeenth tank of water. We are now three six one point five million miles from Earth or forty million miles beyond the Pluto orbit. Both distances may be taken as meaningless. The last fuel rocket reached us yesterday, striking a parallel track a mile away. Due to some necessary manoeuvring on our part we used extra fuel, consequently I have switched out and jettisoned tanks two and seven. End of report.
None of us aboard likes the quietness. Usually the Ear picks up a host of sounds; I believe the marine sailors back on Earth developed a similar if crude method of listening to the sounds of the fish. It is possible to distinguish one space-dweller from another by their different radio-noises. But the Ear is silent now, because all the life of space has fled inwards to the shallows of the solar system, just as fish flee to the reef when the shark approaches. Space is empty, silent and waiting for who knows what dark thing? We head into the blackness, to catch sharks.
Above the chart-table, which serves me as a desk, hangs a framed parchment. I know its message by heart.
"It has a soul that hungers for warmth, yet warmth would kill it. For it is not of a sun or a space, a place or a race, but a hatred, a coldness, a deeper blackness slinking in the sunless shadows. It is the dweller in the darkness. And, because it is not of them, it hates all the creatures of the golden shallows and the light that is blessed.
"Undreamt of, it waits in its misery and cold loneliness, and in its hatred it howls at the stars."
Those are the last words of the Fragment--it has no other name. It was written, sweated into stone, by the survivors of a dead race. The rest of it tells of the manner of their death, and of something that howled at the stars.
Again I turn to the log, for the first time in a week. I find it soothing to put my thoughts down on paper--it is hardly a true log, because no-one else will ever read it--and besides, we speak to each other very little on board a ship. Even in the normal run of events, conversation tends to be exhausted by the time the Saturn orbit is reached, and is replaced by what almost amounts to a form of mental communication. Of course, the explanation is that a spaceship crew is especially chosen so that they interlock psychologically. They have to. An argument in a tin can is a terrible thing.
This has been a very quiet trip even so, or perhaps I should say that each one of us has been busy with his own thoughts? Any voyage has an element of risk, but a deep-space expedition is an unknown quantity. There is always at the back of one's mind the knowledge that one of the larger and hungrier dwellers might find the spaceship. An insignificant failure in a tiny electronic component could mean the breakdown of the entire ship. There is the danger of meteorites, sparse out here but still existent. A slight fracture in a fuel pipe. Miscalculation of orbits. We are going to die soon anyway, but we would prefer instant oblivion to a lingering death. And we know now that the thing we look for exists. We can feel its presence somewhere up ahead, in t he same way that a an knows that he is being watched. A sense of foreboding, a kind of mental coldness, pervades the ship.
This morning Donovan and Brewer went out in the scooter with an Ear and a steel-mesh net. There was no particular reason; the ship is not equipped for biological study and even if it were there would be no way of getting the results back to Earth. It was just that both of them felt the need to escape from the routine of the ship, even for a few hours. But they found nothing within a hundred miles but a few plankton-like space-grazers and a small barnaby, half-bitten through. There was no clean-cut bite such as a nuke would leave, and if it had blundered into a school of pirantules or basiliks there would be nothing left but the shell. It was a half-dissolved husk; almost as if the creature had, in an attempt to flee from something, started to use its own body as fuel for its drive organs. Donovan, who used to be a biologist, thinks it has nothing to do with out search and I agree with him. It is better for my peace of mind.
There is talk of turning back. We have taken to talking again, even to speaking our thoughts out loud, anything to lessen the tension. Jasson, the engineer and fourth member of our crew, was the first to voice what we all have at one time thought. It would be so easy, to turn the ship around and flee. Why should I not say it? It is a naked feeling being out here, suspended in nothingness, being seen and yet not able to see; I was about to agree with Jasson but Donovan had said nothing and I waited. We looked at each other and I could read his feelings. He knows, just as I know, just as we all know, that we crossed the point of no return when we crossed the Pluto orbit, that even the largest ship only holds so much fuel, even if we could return we would be shot down because of what we carry; we have no choice but to continue; that warhead in the nose has been leaking radiation at us for months, very slowly but very deadly. We are in fact flying a sophisticated bomb and heaven preserve us when we explode it, for it will certainly take us with it. An interesting philosophical thought, but it really makes little difference to me. Were we back o Earth it would be a court-martial and an iron chair for Jasson and I. Donovan is dying slowly. Brewer is here becuase he thinks he is a Christian.
But even so it would feel better to head around and escape from the darkness. I have noticed a nagging desire to be constantly looking over my shoulder; we are all on edge. It is so quiet and clean and cold in the ship that I jump every time a relay clicks. Up on the outside of the hull is a piece of apparatus that keeps automatically fixed on the sun. It is part of the old navigational equipment and on the console it registers by a small red light on a map of the starfield. It is a reassuring thing. I did not realize how much we depended on it. Yesterday I had to manoeuvre the ship slightly, to compensate for the jettisoning of two more used tanks. The ship turned over due to a fact reaction on the part of one of the steering rockets, and for a few moments we lost the sun.
When I was training we used to float weightless outside the satellite while the earth turned beneath us. Although we all had perfectly adequate jet packs which we knew how to use, no power on or above the earth could make us let go of the safety cord. Our senses told us that we would fall, so we hung on for grim life. When the instructor cut the cord there was a moment of terror, then suddenly there was no cause for fear.
When we lost the sun it was a thousand times worse, like forgetting one's name. It suddenly struck us that we were in a void with nothing below us but an infinite fall and there was no point to anchor our senses. We were in the centre of the universe, and it was cold and empty and hostile. When the red light flashed on again Brewer was unconscious. The shock lasted several hours.
We are now well beyond the system. Donovan went out onto the hull this morning and cut loose the last of the external tanks, leaving only the rear tube which will boost our speed when the time comes.
Out here the stars are bright. There is no gas or dust or atmosphere to dull their hard brilliance, and they are terrible and far distant. And we are only on the edge of space, where the solar shallows merge with the night like a sea; men must be fools to try and cross that sea, in their little coracle craft. For what monsters lurk beyond the starlight? Not only living monsters but more subtle things that wait to take hold of a man's mind and twist it in the darkness, beasts like fear and dread of the emptiness. And things that crawl like maggots on dead suns, slithering things that breed and spawn and die on the primal stuff of stars. No monster of the deep, no slumbering kraken, was ever more fearful than he. I see him as a great dark cloud, lonely and miserable and hating.
We know he exists now. Sometimes a star is blotted out for a while, and a shadow slides across space.
When Donovan came in we welded the airlock shut. It was an unnecessary gesture, but a strangely comforting one.
The Ear is silent yet sometimes when I am alone I think I can hear a sound, soft and on the threshold of hearing, coming from the darkness. Then when I listen it goes. Jasson rigged up a larger power-line for the Ear and when it is directed backwards it is still possible to hear the sounds of the system, but around us it still brings in nothing but star-hiss. A few hours ago I picked up the faint distant creaking of a barnaby, but before I could get a fix on it, it had dopplered away in the direction of the sun.
Brewer had taken to praying a lot. I think he was a fool to volunteer for this trip, but I suppose I can see his reasons. The rest of us are here as an alternative to slow death. Sitting on a bomb is a lot quicker and cleaner than cancer or a noose and who knows? They might put up some kind of statue of us gazing valiantly into the sunset with a faraway look in our eyes--stone eyes, of course, so as not to waste metal. It makes very little difference out here, but I prefer the stone kind.
They are all with me in the main cabin now; Jasson is trying to read a book but he hasn't turned a page while I have been watching him. Donovan is looking out at the stars as usual. Brewer gazes at the chessboard. I am sitting at my table and watching the others as I write. What a fascinating study they make! Three men waiting for death! Brewer: Did he want to be a martyr or a hero, or was he doing what he thought was right? Either way I cannot help despising him for what he is. Jasson and I: The simple choice between death now or death later. The life-wish flourishes by clinging to every second. And Donovan. He said very little but he seemed almost content to be out here. Perhaps he prefers to meet death here on his own terms than in a hospital bed. Who can blame him? I thought that men faced with the fact of death went mad, but I have never seen anyone more sane than these three. It's almost gruesome how sane they are. I can nearly hear them think.
Can they still see us back on Earth? I doubt it. Strange to think of Earth now, it has no place here. Planets are ridiculous things compared to the vastness, little monuments of insularity orbiting peacefully in backwaters and pools out of reach of tides and storms. They drag the stars down to mere points of light in the sky, like a reflection of the sun on the water. Soon we will look on the ocean, away from the false security of Earth.
The Ear is silent. Jasson is bent over it; I think he can detect something. We all know what it is.
We can all hear it now, a small sound on the edge of hearing. It grows.
A barnaby swarm, buzzing like a hive of bees, hissing past us on all sides as though fleeing from hell--and now silence again. Something is coming in from the depths--
There is no more for me to write.
I have switched on the last tank, and the ship is gathering speed. Soon it will be all over--for us at least. Does it matter very much? It will be instantaneous. And we have learned much on this voyage, a strange and rather final method of education. We have learned that man's enemy is not man, or death.
That sound we heard, that thing out there. It holds the secret, but even that is only part of a greater pattern. But that sound! It was a mixture of hatred and misery, loneliness, fear and grief.
The End
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