Atomic Station

Frank Belknap Long

It was incredible and a little frightening. The rocket ship was within a half million miles of the Station, but as yet no reply had come to the frantic signals which Roger Sheldon had been sending out at ten second intervals.

He sat before the observation glass in the control room, a big man with the competent hands of an experienced navigator, and a curious mobility of expression which seemed out of keeping with the precise movements which those hands were making on the board.

His face was that of a man who had gazed on great unfathomable star fields smouldering in the depths of space and then-had deliberately curbed his exaltation and turned back to concern himself with the little affairs of Earth.

In three months and two days Roger Sheldon had passed completely beyond the Sun's gravitational tug into the utter darkness, the chill bleak immensity of interstellar space. To have accomplished more he would have bartered all the years of his youth. He had hardly dared hope to accomplish as much.

Now he was returning to the Station with his thoughts in a turmoil. His nerves were so taut he was afraid to relax even for the brief instant it would have taken him to shake a few grains of amytal into his palm and inhale the fumes.

For two generations the Station had encircled the Earth, an outpost of security bright with promise, the concrete embodiment of humanity's determination not to destroy itself.

While atomic research had remained in the uranium fission stage, the vast laboratory facilities of Earth had not endangered humanity. Even the first atomic bombs had not placed an intolerable strain on man's capacity to survive the hazards of working together toward a shared goal.

But the tremendous series of explosions which had rocked the Earth on June sixteenth, in 1969, had convinced even men of good will that a controlled, disciplined release of the mighty forces locked up within the atom could no longer take place on Earth.

It could only be allowed in an orbit far enough removed from Earth to jeopardize only the Station itself and the lives of a few men. Carefully integrated psychometric tests had shown that not more than a dozen men could coordinate their efforts under the constant threat of annihilation without developing personality quirks as dangerous as trigger neutrons would have been in the days of the New Mexico experiment.

Seventy million miles from the Earth the Station moved through the interplanetary night, a mile-long floating laboratory. This laboratory was equipped with every safety device known to modern science for the control of energies powerful enough to disrupt every vestige of matter within a half million miles of its orbit.

In 2022 a dozen men could have destroyed the Earth. Instead, on that little self-contained macrocosm, containing accommodations for fewer than a hundred men, women and children, the first interstellar ship had been constructed and powered with undreamed of energies.

To that little macrocosm the ship was now returning, piloted by one of those twelve men.

Sheldon would have thrown back his head and laughed long and heartily if someone had suggested that power could go to the head of a man like John Gale. Nominally Gale, a great bundle of immense kindliness, as selfless as a carven Buddha, was in command of the Station. But it was of no great consequence who was in command, because those men really could be trusted.

Sheldon stiffened abruptly. His eyes shifted from the control board to the observation glass. Unmistakably the gravity scanners had picked up a moving object in the darkness ahead, and were transmitting it to the glass, line by hazy line until a filmy opacity was hovering in the precise middle of the instrument.

Sheldon recognized the Station from the peculiar flatness of its contours. At a quarter million miles it showed up as a misty ovoid, flattened at both ends and faintly rimmed with light. By pressing hard with its thumb on both sides of a clay egg a child could have produced a fair facsimile of the Station as it appeared in the glass, except that the image was in rapid motion.

At a hundred million miles Sheldon cut all but two of the stern jets, and prepared to bring the ship in. His face was haggard with strain. He had given up trying to contact Gale. He'd know in a moment, he told himself grimly, why his signals had been ignored. Until he did know it was useless to speculate about the reason, or reasons, for Gale's silence.

The ship made a perfect nine-point landing, almost drifting in over the uppermost of the two sectional metal platforms which jutted out from the Station's central section like the wings of a colossal, space-spawned bat.

Five minutes later Sheldon was emerging from the gravity lock into a glow which lighted the darkness about him in all directions. Beyond the glow immense shadows crouched. When he raised his eyes he could see the stars, clusters of them winking just beyond the rim of the great bulk of floating metal from which he'd taken off six months previously.

His features were almost unbelievably haggard now, and he felt as though he'd left a part of himself in the vast reaches of utter darkness which lay between the stars.

He had left the shadow cast by the ship and was moving toward the edge of the platform when he heard a voice.

"Stop!" it yelled. "Who you?"

Startled, Sheldon swung about. As he did so a gaunt, massive-browed figure detached itself slowly from the shadows and came shambling toward him.

For an instant Sheldon stared in utter disbelief, a coldness encircling his scalp. The figure was that of a seven foot giant, with bulging biceps and a tangle of coarse black hair on his chest. His features were repulsively apelike. His apparel consisted solely of a soiled and tattered waist-cloth which encircled his hips, and clung loosely to his hairy thighs.

As Sheldon returned the brutish creature's stare he perceived with sudden horror that he wasn't clasping a modern weapon of science but an enormous wooden hatchet which gleamed dully in the steady glow.

Even the blade of the weapon was made of wood, but so sharply edged was it that Sheldon was under no illusion as to what would happen if he gave the giant an excuse to send it crashing against his skull.

"Where's Gale?" he demanded, realizing the futility of the question even as he asked it. "I've got to talk to him. You hear? Gale!"

Sheldon wasn't prepared for the convulsive hate which flared in the giant's stare the instant he recognized the elderly scientist's name. That the savage creature did recognize Gale's name was startlingly evident, for he repeated it slowly, his lips writhing back from his teeth.

"Gale!" he snarled. "Him very old. Many years dead."

It seemed to Sheldon that an abyss had opened up beneath him, filled with a blackness so bottomless that he was powerless to adjust himself to it. He stood staring at the giant in stunned disbelief, his face a bloodless mask.

With terrifying suddenness the giant's immense hairy hand shot out to fasten on Sheldon's shoulders.

"You come to find Gale?" he snarled.

Sheldon struggled then. Foolishly he tried to free himself, clasping the giant's wrist, and tugging at it with all his strength. With a desperation born of terror he even tried to wrench the hatchet from the savage creature's clasp.

He succeeded only in further enraging the brute. Shaking his arm free, the giant snarled savagely, raised the hatchet, and brought it down on Sheldon's skull.

Just how violently Sheldon was not to know, for the instant the blade struck him a terrible, light-lanced blackness exploded inside his head. With a groan he sank down, rolled over, and lay still.

He did not see the giant raise his arms skyward, grimace hideously, and dance wildly up and down beneath the pale stars. Faster and faster, his body bending sharply as convulsive tremors shook him. Shrieking, whirling, bending and straightening, the hatchet in his clasp gleaming redly in the steady light as he danced.

Sheldon's head was aching when he sat up. Instinctively he pressed his hand to his temple and withdrew it with a groan of pain.

Curiously, consciousness hadn't returned slowly, leaving him confused. It had returned swiftly. He knew that there was a deep gash in his forehead and that he was fortunate to be alive.

Painstakingly he explored the gash again. It was still bleeding a little, but he was quite sure that the ax hadn't penetrated his skull. His vision was much too clear, his faculties too abnormally alert.

He could make out every detail of the small, metal-walled room into which he'd been carried by his brutish assailant.

Carried or dragged. He had no way of knowing. He only knew that he was now sitting up with his back to a firm metal wall, staring straight across the room at a low metal bench.

On the bench sat a dozen rosy-cheeked, almost doll-like little figures clothed in fantastically bright garments that seemed to be made of tissue paper.

The little figures had the pudgy hands and dimpled legs of very young infants, and they were staring at him out of wide dark eyes that stubbornly refused to blink.

It all seemed like a dream. But Sheldon knew that it wasn't. He even knew that the little figures were not infants. They were more like Lilliputians, except that Lilliputians could blink.

Was that because they lacked power to move, he wondered wildly. If only they would walk, shift their positions a little or cease to regard him with that fixed, unwavering stare.

Suddenly the door opened, and a girl came into the room. A full-bosomed, strikingly pretty girl, wearing a plain...