"… apart from your assignments, you must always be receptive to, be prepared for, and act upon all news potential from strange sources though it may lead you to the end of the solar system — perhaps even to the very edge of the universe…" From the Interplanetary Newsman's Manual

Chapter One

Herb Harper snapped on the radio and a voice snarled, billions of miles away: "Police ship 968. Keep watch for freighter Vulcan on the Earth-Venus run. Search ship for drugs. Believed to be…”

Herb spun the dial. A lazy voice floated through the ship: "Pleasure yacht Helen, three hours out of Sandebar. Have you any messages for us?”

He spun the dial again. The voice of Tim Donovan, radio's ace newscaster, rasped "Tommy Evans will have to wait a few more days before attempting his flight to Alpha Centauri. The Solar Commerce commission claims to have found some faults in the construction of his new generators, but Tommy still insists that those generators will shoot him along at a speed well over that of light. Nevertheless, he has been ordered to bring his ship back to Mars so that technicians may check it before he finally takes off.

Tommy is out on Pluto now, all poised for launching off into space beyond the solar system. At last reports he had made no move to obey the order of the commission. Tommy's backers, angered by the order, call it high-handed, charge there are politics back of it…”

Herb shut off the radio and walked to the door separating the living quarters of the Space Pup from the control room.

"Hear that, Gary?" he asked. "Maybe we'll get to see this guy, Evans, after all.”

Gary Nelson, puffing at his foul, black pipe, scowled savagely at Herb.

"Who wants to see that glory grabber?" he asked.

"What's biting you now?" asked Herb.

"Nothing," said Gary, "except Tommy Evans. Ever since we left Saturn we haven't heard a thing out of Donovan except this Tommy Evans.”

Herb stared at his lanky partner.

"You sure got a bad case of space fever," he said. "You been like a dog with a sore head the last few days.”

"Who wouldn't get space fever?" snapped Gary. He gestured out through the vision plate. "Nothing but space," he said. "Blackness with little stars.

Stars that have forgotten how to twinkle. Going hundreds of miles a second and you wonder if you're moving. No change in scenery. A few square feet of space to live in. Black space pressing all about you, taunting you, trying to get in…”

He stopped and sat down limply in the pilot's chair.

"How about a game of chess?" asked Herb.

Gary twisted about and snapped at him:

"Don't mention chess to me again, you sawed-off shrimp. I'll space-walk you if you do. So help me Hannah if I won't.”

"Thought maybe it would quiet you down," said Herb.

Gary levelled his pipe stem at Herb.

"If I had the guy who invented three-way chess," he said, "I'd wring his blasted neck. The old kind was bad enough, but three-dimensional, twenty-seven man…”

He shook his head dismally.

"He must have been half nuts," he said.

"He did go off his rockers," Herb told him, "but not from inventing three-way chess. Guy by the name of Konrad Fairbanks. In an asylum back on Earth now. I took a picture of him once, when he was coming out of the courtroom. Just after the judge said he was only half there. The cops chased hell out of me but I got away. The Old Man paid me ten bucks bonus for the shot.”

"I remember that," said Gary. "Best mathematical mind in the whole system.

Worked out equations no one could understand. Went screwy when he proved that there actually were times when one and one didn't quite make two.

Proved it, you understand. Not just theory or mathematical mumbo-jumbo.”

Herb walked across the control room and stood beside Gary, looking out through the vision plate.

"Everything been going all right?" he asked.

Gary growled deep in his throat.

"What could go wrong out here? Not even any meteors. Nothing to do but sit and watch. And there really isn't any need of that. The robot navigator handles everything." The soft purr of the geosectors filled the ship. There was no other sound. The ship seemed standing still in space. Saturn swung far down to the right, a golden disk of light with thin, bright rings.

Pluto was a tiny speck of light almost dead ahead, a little to the left.

The Sun, three billion miles astern, was shielded from their sight.

The Space Pup was headed for Pluto at a pace that neared a thousand miles a second. The geosectors, warping the curvature of space itself, hurled the tiny ship through the void at a speed unthought of less than a hundred years before.

And now Tommy Evans, out on Pluto, was ready, if only the Solar Commerce commission would stop its interference, to bullet his experimental craft away from the solar system, out toward the nearest star, 4.29 light-years distant. Providing his improved electro-gravatic geodesic deflectors lived up to the boast of their inventors, he would exceed the speed of light, would vanish into that limbo of impossibility that learned savants only a few centuries before had declared was unattainable.

"It kind of makes a fellow dizzy," Herb declared.

"What does?”

"Why," said Herb, "this Tommy Evans stunt. The boy is making history. And maybe we'll be there to see him do it. He's the first to make a try at the stars — and if he wins, there will be lots of others. Man will go out and out and still farther out, maybe clear out to where space is still exploding.”

Gary grunted. "They sure will have to hurry some," he said, "because space is exploding fast.”

"Now look here," said Herb. "You can't just sit there and pretend the human race has made no progress. Take this ship, just for example. We don't rely on rockets any more except in taking off and landing. Once out in space and we set the geosectors to going and we warp space and build up speed that no rocket could ever hope to give you. We got an atmosphere generator that manufactures air. No more stocking up on oxygen and depending on air purifiers. Same thing with food. The machine just picks up matter and energy out of space and transmutes them into steaks and potatoes — or at least their equivalent in food value. And we send news stories and pictures across billions of miles of space. You just sit down in front of that spacewriter and whang away at the keys and in a few hours another machine back in New York writes what you have written.”

Gary yawned. "How you run on," he said, "We haven't even started yet — the human race hasn't. What we have done isn't anything to what we are going to do. That is, if the race doesn't get so downright ornery that it kills itself off first.”

The spacewriter in the corner of the room stuttered and gibbered, warming up under the impulse of the warning signals, flung out hours before and three billion miles away.

The two men hurried across the room and hung over it.

Slowly, laboriously, the keys began to tap.

NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. HAVE INFO EVANS MAY TAKE OFF FOR CENTAURI WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION OF SCC. MAKE ALL POSSIBLE SPEED TO PLUTO.

HANDLE SOONEST. MOST IMPORTANT. RUSH. REGARDS. EVENING ROCKET.

The machine burped to a stop. Herb looked at Gary.

"Maybe that guy Evans has got some guts after all," said Gary. "Maybe he'll tell the SCC where to stick it. They been asking for it for a long time now.”

Herb grunted. "They won't chase after him, that's sure." Gary sat down before the sending board and threw the switch. The hum of the electric generators drowned out the moan of the geosectors as they built up the power necessary to hurl a beam of energy across the void to Earth.

"Only one thing wrong with this setup," said Gary. "It takes too long and it takes too much power. I wish someone would hurry up and figure out a way to use the cosmics for carriers.”

"Doe Kingsley, out on Pluto, has been fooling around with cosmics," said Herb. "Maybe he'll turn the trick in another year of two.”

"Doe Kingsley has been fooling around with a lot of things out there," said Gary. "If the man would only talk, we'd have more than one story to send back from Pluto.”

The dynamos had settled into a steady hum of power. Gary glanced at the dials and reached out his fingers. He wrote:

EVENING ROCKET. EARTH. WILL CONTACT EVANS AT ONCE IF STILL ON PLUTO. IF NOT WILL SEND STORY ON FLIGHT. NOTHING TO REPORT OUT HERE. WEATHER FINE. HERB DROPPED OUR LAST QUART AND BROKE IT. HOW ABOUT A RAISE.

"That last," he said, "will get 'em.”

"You didn't have to put that in about the Scotch," Herb declared. "It just slipped out of my fingers.”

"Sure," said Gary. "It just slipped out of your fingers. Right smack-dab onto a steel plate and busted all to hell. After this, I handle the liquor.

When you want a drink, you ask me.”

"Maybe Kingsley will have some liquor," Herb said hopefully. "Maybe he'll lend us a bottle.”

"If he does," declared Gary, "you keep your paws off of it. Between you sucking away at it and dropping it, I don't get more than a drink or two out of each bottle. We still got Uranus and Neptune to do after Pluto and it looks like a long dry spell.”

He got up and walked to the fore part of the ship, gazing out through the vision plate.

"Only Neptune and Uranus ahead," he said. "And that's enough. If the Old Man ever thinks up any more screwball stunts, he can find someone else to do them. When I get back I'm going to ask him to give me back my old beat at the space terminal and I'm going to settle down there for the rest of my natural life. I'm going to watch the ships come in and take off and I'm going to get down on my hands and knees and kiss the ground each time and be thankful I'm not on them.”

"He's paying us good dough," said Herb. "We got bank accounts piling up back home.”

Gary pretended not to hear him.

"Know Your Solar System," he said. "Special articles run every Sunday in the Evening Rocket. Story by Leary Nelson. Pictures by Herbert Harper.

Intrepid newsmen brave perils of space to bring back true picture of the solar system's planets. One year alone in a spaceship, bringing to the readers of the Rocket a detailed account of life in space, of life on the planets. Remember how the promotion gang busted a gut advertising us. Full page ads and everything.”

He spat.

"Stuff for kids," he said.

"The kids probably think we're heroes," said Herb. "Probably they read our stuff and then pester the folks to buy them a spaceship. Want to go out and see Saturn for themselves.”

"The Old Man said it would boost circulation," declared Gary. "Hell, he'd commit suicide if he thought it would boost circulation. Remember what he told us. Says he:

'Go out and visit all the planets. Get first-hand information and pictures.

Shoot them back to us. We'll run them every Sunday in the magazine section.' Just like he was sending us around the corner to cover a fire.

That's all there was to it. Just a little over a year out in space. Living in a spaceship and a spacesuit. Hurry through Jupiter's moons to get out to Saturn and then take it on the lam for Pluto. Soft job. Nice vacation for you. That's what the Old Man said. Nice soft vacation, he said.”

His pipe gurgled threateningly and he knocked it out viciously against the heel of his hand.

"Well," said Herb, "we're almost to Pluto. A few days more and we'll be there. They got a fuelling station and a radio and Doc Kingsley's laboratories out there. Maybe we can promote us a poker game.”

Gary walked to the telescopic screen and switched it on.

"Let's take a look at her," he said.

The great circular screen glowed softly. Within it swam the image of Pluto, still almost half a billion miles away. A dead planet that shone dully in the faint light of the far distant Sun. A planet locked in the frigid grip of naked space, a planet that had been dead long before the first stirring of life had taken place on Earth.

The vision was blurred and Gary manipulated dials to bring it more sharply into focus.

"Wait a second," snapped Herb. His lingers reached out and grasped Gary's wrist.

"Turn it back a ways," he said. "I saw something out there. Something that looked like a ship. Maybe it's Evans coming back.”

Slowly Gary twisted the dial back. A tiny spot of light danced indistinctly on the screen.

"That's it," breathed Herb. "Easy now. Just a little more.”

The spot of light leaped into sharper focus. But it was merely a spot of light, nothing more, a tiny, shining thing in space. Some metallic body that was catching and reflecting the light of the Sun.

"Give it more power," said Herb.

Swiftly the spot of light grew, assumed definite shape. Gary stepped the magnification up until the thing filled the entire screen.

It was a ship — and yet it couldn't be a ship.

"It has no rocket tubes," said Herb in amazement. "Without tubes how could it get off the ground? You can't use geosectors in taking off. They twist space all to hell and gone. They'd turn a planet inside out.”

Gary studied it. "It doesn't seem to be moving," he said. "Maybe some motion, but not enough to detect.”

"A derelict," suggested Herb.

Gary shook his head. "Still doesn't explain the lack of tubes," he said.

The two men lifted their eyes from the screen and looked at one another.

"The Old Man said we were to hurry to Pluto," Herb reminded Gary.

Gary wheeled about and strode back to the controls. He lowered his gangling frame into the pilot's chair and disconnected the robot control. His lingers reached out, switched off the geosectors, pumped fuel into the rocket chambers.

"Find something to hang onto," he said, grimly. "We're stopping to see what this is all about.”

Chapter Two

The mysterious space-shell was only a few miles distant. With Herb at the controls, the Space Pup cruised in an ever-tightening circle around the glinting thing that hung there just off Pluto's orbit.

It was a spaceship. Of that there could be no doubt despite the fact that it had no rocket tubes. It was hanging motionless. There was no throb of power within it, no apparent life, although dim light glowed through the vision ports in what probably were the living quarters just back of the control room.

Gary crouched in the airlock of the Space Pup, with the outer valve swung back. He made sure that his pistols were securely in their holsters and cautiously tested the spacesuit's miniature propulsion units.

He spoke into his helmet mike.

"All right, Herb," he said, "I'm going. Try to tighten up the circle a bit.

Keep a close watch. That thing out there may be dynamite.”

"Keep your nose clean," said Herb's voice in the phones. Gary straightened and pushed himself out from the lock.

He floated smoothly in space, in a gulf of nothing, a place without direction, without an up or down, an unsubstantial place with the fiery eyes of distant stars ringing him around.

His steel-gloved hand dropped to the propulsion mechanism that encircled his waist. Midget rocket tubes flared with tiny flashes of blue power and he was jerked forward, heading for the mystery ship. Veering too far to the right, he gave the right tube a little more fuel and straightened out.

Steadily, under the surging power of the spacesuit tubes, he forged ahead through space toward the ship. He saw the gleaming lights of the Space Pup slowly circle in front of him and then pass out of sight.

A quarter of a mile away, he shut off the tubes and glided slowly in to the drifting shell. He struck its pitted side with the soles of his magnetic boots and stood upright.

Cautiously he worked his way toward one of the ports from which came the faint gleam of light. Lying at full length, he peered through the foot-thick quartz. The light was feeble and he could see but little. There was no movement of life, no indication that the shell was tenanted. In the center of what at one time had been the living quarters, he saw a large rectangular shape, like a huge box. Aside from this, however, be could make out nothing.

Working his way back to the lock, he saw that it was tightly closed. He had expected that. He stamped against the plates with his heavy boots, hoping to attract attention. But if any living thing were inside, it either did not hear or disregarded the clangor that he made.

Slowly he moved away from the lock, heading for the control-room vision plate, hoping from there to get a better view into the shell's interior. As he moved, his eyes caught a curious irregularity just to the right of the lock, as if faint lines had been etched into the steel of the hull.

He dropped to one knee and saw that a single line of crude lettering had been etched into the metal. Brushing at it with his gloved hand, he tried to make it out. Laboriously, he struggled with it. It was simple, direct, to the point, a single declaration. When one writes with steel and acid, one is necessarily brief.

The line read:

Control room vision-plate unlocked.

Amazed, he read the line again, hardly believing what he read. But there it was. That single line, written with a single purpose. Simple directions for gaining entrance.

Crouched upon the steel plating, he felt a shiver run through his body.

Someone had etched that line in hope that someone would come. But perhaps he was too late. The ship had an old look about it. The lines of it, the way the ports were set into the hull, all were marks of spaceship designing that had become obsolete centuries before.

He felt the cold chill of mystery and the utter bleakness of outer space closing in about him. He gazed up over the bulged outline of the shell and saw the steely glare of remote stars. Stars secure in the depth of many light-years, jeering at him, jeering at men who held dreams of stellar conquest.

He shook himself, trying to shake off the probing fingers of half-fear, glanced around to locate the Space Pup, saw it slowly moving off to his right.

Swiftly, but carefully, he made his way over the nose of the ship and up to the vision plate.

Squatting in front of the plate, he peered down into the control cabin. But it wasn't a control cabin. It was a laboratory. In the tiny room which at one time must have housed the instruments of navigation, there was now no trace of control panel or calculator or telescopic screen. Rather, there were work tables, piled with scientific apparatus, banks and rows of chemical containers. All the paraphernalia of the scientist's workshop.

The door into the living quarters, where he had seen the large oblong box was closed. All the apparatus and the bottles in the laboratory were carefully arranged, neatly put away, as if someone had tidied up before they walked off and left the place.

He puzzled for a moment. That lack of rocket tubes, the indications that the ship was centuries old, the scrawled acid-etched line by the lock, the laboratory in the control room… what did it all add up to? He shook his head. It didn't make much sense.

Bracing himself against the curving steel hide of the shell, he pushed at the vision-plate. But he could exert little effort. Lack of gravity, inability to brace himself securely, made the task a hard one. Rising to his feet, he stamped his heavy boots against the glass, but the plate refused to budge.

As a last desperate effort, he might use his guns, blast his way into the shell. But that would be long, tedious work… and there would be a certain danger. There should be, he told himself, an easier and a safer way.

Suddenly the way came to him, but he hesitated, for there lay danger, too.

He could lie down on the plate, turn on the rocket tubes of his suit and use his body as a battering ram, as a lever, to force the stubborn hinges.

But it would be an easy matter to turn on too much power, so much power that his body would be pounded to a pulp against the heavy quartz.

Shrugging at the thought, he stretched flat on the plate, hands folded under him with fingers on the tube controls. Slowly he turned the buttons.

The rockets thrust at his body, jamming him against the quartz. He snapped the studs shut. It had seemed, for a moment, that the plate had given just a little.

Drawing in a deep breath, he twisted the studs again. Once more his body slammed against the plate, driven by the flaming tubes.

Suddenly the plate gave way, swung in and plunged him down into the laboratory. Savagely he snapped the studs shut. He struck hard against the floor, cracked his helmet soundly.

Groggily he groped his way to his feet. The thin whine of escaping atmosphere came to his ears and unsteadily he made his way forward. Leaping at the plate, he slammed it back into place again. It closed with a thud, driven deep into its frame by the force of rushing air.

A chair stood beside a table and he swung around, sat down in it, still dizzy from the fall. He shook his head to clear away the cobwebs.

There was atmosphere here. That meant that an atmosphere generator still was operating, that the ship had developed no leaks and was still airtight.

He raised his helmet slightly. Fresh pure air swirled into his nostrils, better air than he had inside his suit. A little highly oxygenated, perhaps, but that was all. If the atmosphere machine had run for a long time unattended, it might have gotten out of adjustment slightly, might be mixing a bit too much oxygen with the air output.

He swung the helmet back and let it dangle on the hinge at the back of the neck, gulped in great mouthfuls of the atmosphere. His head cleared rapidly.

He looked around the room. There was little that he had not already seen. A practical, well-equipped laboratory, but much of the equipment, he now realized, was old.

Some of it was obsolete and that fitted in with all the rest of it.

A framed document hung above a cabinet and getting to his feet, he walked across the room to look at it. Bending close, he read it. It was a diploma from the College of Science at Alkatoon, Mars, one of the most outstanding of several universities on the Red Planet. The diploma had been issued to one Caroline Martin.

Gary read the name a second time. It seemed that he should know it. It raised some memory in his brain, but just what it was he couldn't say, an elusive recognition that eluded him by the faintest margin.

He looked around the room.

Caroline Martin.

A girl who had left a diploma in this cabin, a pitiful reminder of many years ago. He bent again and looked at the date upon the sheep-skin. It was 5976. He whistled softly. A thousand years ago!

A thousand years. And if Caroline Martin had left this diploma here a thousand years ago, where was Caroline Martin now? What had happened to her? Dead in what strange corner of the solar system? Dead in this very ship?

He swung about and strode toward the door that led into the living quarters. His hand reached out and seized the door and pushed it open. He took one step across the threshold and then he stopped, halted in his stride.

In the center of the room was the oblong box that he had seen from the port. But instead of a box, it was a tank, bolted securely to the floor by heavy steel brackets.

The tank was filled with a greenish fluid and in the fluid lay a woman, a woman dressed in metallic robes that sparkled in the light from the single radium bulb in the ceiling just above the tank.

Breathlessly, Gary moved closer, peered over the edge of the tank, down through the clear green liquid into the face of the woman. Her eyes were closed and long, curling black lashes lay against the whiteness of her cheeks. Her forehead was high and long braids of raven hair were bound about her head. Slim black eyebrows arched to almost meet above the delicately modeled nose. Her mouth was a thought too large, a trace of the patrician in the thin, red lips. Her arms were laid straight along her sides and the metallic gown swept in flowing curves from chin to ankles.

Beside her right hand, lying in the bottom of the tank, was a hypodermic syringe, bright and shining despite the green fluid which covered it.

Gary's breath caught in his throat.

She looked alive and yet she couldn't be alive. Still there was a flush of youth and beauty in her cheeks, as if she merely slept.

Laid out as if for death and still with the lie to death in her very look.

Her face was calm, serene… and something else. Expectancy, perhaps. As if she only waited for a thing she hoped to happen.

Caroline Martin was the name on the diploma out in the laboratory. Could this be Caroline Martin? Could this be the girl who had graduated from the college of science at Alkatoon ten centuries ago?

Gary shook his head uneasily.

He stepped back from the tank and as he did he saw the copper plate affixed to its metal side. He stooped to read.

Another simple message, etched in copper… a message from the girl who lay inside the tank.

I am not dead. I am in suspended animation. Drain the tank by opening the valve. Use the syringe you find in the medicine cabinet.

Gary glanced across the room, saw a medicine chest on the wall above a washbowl. He looked back at the tank and mopped his brow with his coat sleeve.

"It isn't possible," he whispered.

Like a man in a dream, he stumbled to the medicine chest. The syringe was there. He broke it and saw that it was loaded with a cartridge filled with a reddish substance. A drug, undoubtedly, to overcome suspended animation.

Replacing the syringe, he went back to the tank and found the valve. It was stubborn with the years, defying all the strength in his arms. He kicked it with a heavy boot and jarred it loose. With nervous hands he opened it and watched the level of the green fluid slowly recede.

Watching, an odd calm came upon him, a steadying calm that made him hard and machine-like to do the thing that faced him. One little slip might spoil it. One fumbling move might undo the work of a thousand years. What if the drug in the hypodermic had lost its strength? There were so many things that might happen.

But there was only one thing to do. He raised a hand in front of him and looked at it. It was a steady hand.

He wasted no time in wondering what it was about. This was not the time for that. Frantic questionings clutched at his thoughts and he shook them off.

Time enough to wonder and to speculate and question when this thing was done.

When the fluid was level with the girl's body, he waited no longer. He leaned over the rim of the tank and lifted her in his arms. For a moment he hesitated, then turned and went to the laboratory and placed her on one of the work tables. The fluid, dripping off the rustling metallic dress, left a trail of wet across the floor.

From the medicine chest he took the hypodermic and went back to the girl.

He lifted her left arm and peered closely at it. There were little punctures, betraying previous use of the needle.

Perspiration stood out on his forehead. If only he knew a little more about this. If only he had some idea of what he was supposed to do.

Awkwardly he shoved the needle into a vein, depressed the plunger. It was done and he stepped back.

Nothing happened. He waited.

Minutes passed and she took a shallow breath. He watched in fascination, saw her come to life again… saw the breath deepen, the eyelids flicker, the right hand twitch.

Then she was looking at him out of deep blue eyes.

"You are all right?" he asked.

It was, he knew, a rather foolish question.

Her speech was broken. Her tongue and lips refused to work the way they should, but he understood what she tried to say.

"Yes, I'm all right." She lay quietly on the table. "What year is this?”

she asked.

"It's 6948," he told her.

Her eyes widened and she looked at him with a startled glance. "Almost a thousand years," she said. "You are sure of the year?”

He nodded. "That is about the only thing that I am really sure of.”

"How is that?”

"Why, finding you here," said Gary, "and reviving you again. I still don't believe it happened.”

She laughed, a funny, discordant laugh because her muscles, inactive for years, had forgotten how to function rightly.

"You are Caroline Martin, aren't you?" asked Gary.

She gave him a quick look of surprise and rose to a sitting position.

"I am Caroline Martin," she answered. "But how did you know that?”

Gary gestured at the diploma. "I read it.”

"Oh," she said. "I'd forgotten all about it.”

"I am Gary Nelson," he told her. "Newsman on the loose. My pal's out there in a spaceship waiting for us.”

"I suppose," she said, "that I should thank you, but I don't know how. Just ordinary thanks aren't quite enough.”

"Skip it," said Gary, tersely.

She stretched her arms above her head.

"It's good to be alive again," she said. "Good to know there's life ahead of you.”

"But," said Gary, "you always were alive. It must have been just like going to sleep.”

"It wasn't sleep," she said. "It was worse than death. Because, you see, I made one mistake.”

"One mistake?”

"Yes, just one mistake. One you'd never think of. At least, I didn't. You see, when animation was suspended every physical process was reduced to almost zero, metabolism slowed down to almost nothing. But with one exception. My brain kept right on working.”

The horror of it sank into Gary slowly. "You mean you knew?”

She nodded. "I couldn't hear or see or feel. I had no bodily sensation. But I could think. I've thought for almost ten centuries. I tried to stop thinking, but I never could.

I prayed something would go wrong and I would die. Anything at all to end that eternity of thought.”

She saw the pity in his eyes.

"Don't waste sympathy on me," she said and there was a note of hardness in her voice. "I brought it on myself. Stubbornness, perhaps. I played a long shot. I took a gamble.”

He chuckled in his throat. "And won.”

"A billion to one shot," she said. "Probably greater odds than that. It was madness itself to do it. This shell is a tiny speck in space. There wasn't, I don't suppose, a billion-to-one chance, if you figured it out on paper, that anyone would find me. I had some hope. Hope that would have reduced those odds somewhat. I placed my faith on someone and I guess they failed me. Perhaps it wasn't their fault. Maybe they died before they could even hunt for me.”

"But how did you do it?" asked Gary. "Even today suspended animation has our scientists stumped. They've made some progress but not much. And you made it work a thousand years ago.”

"Drugs," she said. "Certain Martian drugs. Rare ones. And they have to be combined correctly. Slow metabolism to a point where it is almost non-existent. But you have to be careful. Slow it down too far and metabolism stops. That's death.”

Gary gestured toward the hypodermic. "And that," he said, "reacts against the other drug.”

She nodded gravely.

"The fluid in the tank," he said. "That was to prevent dehydration and held some food value? You wouldn't need much food with metabolism at nearly zero. But how about your mouth and nostrils? The fluid…”

"A mask," she said. "Chemical paste that held up under moisture. Evaporated as soon as it was struck by air.”

"You thought of everything.”

"I had to," she declared. "There was no one else to do my thinking for me.”

She slid off the table and walked slowly toward him.

"You told me a minute ago," she said, "that the scientists of today haven't satisfactorily solved suspended animation.”

He nodded.

"You mean to say they still don't know about these drugs?”

"There are some of them," he said, "who'd give their good right arm to know about them.”

"We knew about them a thousand years ago," the girl said. "Myself and one other. I wonder…”

She whirled on Gary. "Let's get out of here," she cried. "I have a horror of this place.”

"Anything you want to take?" he asked. "Anything I can get together for you?”

She made an impatient gesture.

"No," she said. "I want to forget this place.”

Chapter Three

The Space Pup arrowed steadily toward Pluto. From the engine room came the subdued hum of the geosectors. The vision plate looked out on ebon space with its far-flung way posts of tiny, steely stars. The needle was climbing up near the thousand-miles-a-second mark.

Caroline Martin leaned forward in her chair and stared out at the vastness that stretched eternally ahead. "I could stay and watch forever," she exulted.

Gary, lounging back in the pilot's seat, said quietly:

"I've been thinking about that name of yours. It seems to me I've heard it somewhere. Read it in a book.”

She glanced at him swiftly and then stared out into space.

"Perhaps you have," she said finally.

There was a silence, unbroken except by the humming of the geosectors.

The girl turned back to Gary, chin cupped in her hands. "Probably you have read about me;" she said. 'Perhaps the name of Caroline Martin is mentioned in your histories. You see, I was a member of the old Mars-Earth Research commission during the war with Jupiter. I was so proud of the appointment.

Just four years out of school and I was trying so hard to get a good job in some scientific research work. I wanted to earn money to go back to school again.”

"I'm beginning to remember now," said Gary, "but there must be something wrong. The histories say you were a traitor. They say you were condemned to death.”

"I was a traitor," she said and there was a thread of ancient bitterness in the words she spoke. "I refused to turn over a discovery I made, a discovery that would have won the war. It also would have wrecked the solar system. I told them so, but they were men at war. They were desperate men.

We were losing then.”

"We never did win, really," Gary told her.

"They condemned me to space," she said. "They put me in that shell you found me in and a war cruiser towed it out to Pluto's orbit and cut it loose. It was an old condemned craft, its machinery outmoded. They ripped out the rockets and turned it into a prison for me.”

She made a gesture of silence at the shocked look on their faces.

"The histories don't tell that part of it," said Herb.

"They probably suppressed it," she said. "Men at war will do things that no sane man will do. They would not admit in peace the atrocities that they committed in the time of battle. They put the laboratory in the control room as a final ironic jest. So I could carry out my research, they said.

Research, they told me, I'd not need to turn over to them.”

"Would your discovery have wrecked the system?”

Gary asked.

"Yes," she said, "it would have. That's why I refused to give it to the military board. For that they called me traitor. I think they hoped to break me. I think they thought up to the very last that, faced with exile in space, I would finally crack and give it to them.”

"When you didn't," Herb said, "they couldn't back down. They couldn't afford to let you call their bluff.”

"They never found your notes," said Gary.

She tapped her forehead with a slender finger. "My notes were here," she said.

He looked amazed.

"And still are," she said.

"But how did you get the drugs to carry out your suspended animation?" Gary asked.

She waited for long minutes.

"That's the part I hate to think about," she said. "The part that's hard to think about. I worked with a young man. About my age, then. He must be dead these many years.”

She stopped and Gary could see that she was trying to marshal in her mind what next to say.

"We were in love," she said. "Together we discovered the suspended animation process. We had worked on it secretly for months and were ready to announce it when I was taken before the military tribunal. They never let me see him after that. I was allowed no visitors.

"Out in space, after the war cruiser left, I almost went insane. I invented all sorts of tasks to do. I arranged and rearranged my chemicals and apparatus and then one day I found the drugs, skillfully hidden in a box of chemicals. Only one person in the world besides myself knew about them. I found the drugs and two hypodermic syringes.”

Gary's pipe had gone out and now he relit it. The girl went on.

"I knew it would be a gamble," she said. "I knew he intended that I should take that gamble. Maybe he had a wild scheme of coming out and hunting for me. Maybe something happened and he couldn't come. Maybe he tried and failed. Maybe the war… got him. But he had given me a chance, a desperate chance to beat the fate the military court had set for me. I removed the steel partition in the engine room to make the tank. That took many weeks.

I etched the copper plate. I went outside on the shell and etched the lines beside the lock. I'm afraid that wasn't a very good job.”

"And then," said Herb, "you put yourself to sleep.”

"Not exactly sleep," she said. "Because my brain still worked. I thought and thought for almost a thousand years. My mind set up problems and worked them out. I developed a flair for pure deduction, since my mind was the only thing left for me to work with. I believe I even developed telepathic powers.”

"You mean," asked Herb, "that you can read our thoughts?”

She nodded, then hastened on. "But I wouldn't," she said. "I wouldn't do that to my friends. I knew when Gary first came to the shell. I read the wonder and amazement in his thoughts. I was so afraid he'd go away and leave me alone again. I tried to talk to him with my thoughts, but he was so upset that he couldn't understand.”

Gary shook his head. "Anyone would have been upset," he said.

"But," exploded Herb, "think of the chances that you took. It was just pure luck we found you. Your drug wouldn't have held up forever. Another few thousand years, perhaps, but scarcely longer than that. Then there would be the chance that the atmosphere generators might have failed. Or that a big meteor, or even a small one, for that matter, might have come along. There were a thousand things that could have happened.”

She agreed with him. "It was a long chance. I knew it was. But there was no other way. I could have just sat still and done nothing or gone crazy, grown old and died in loneliness.”

She was silent for a moment.

"It would have been easy," she said then, "if I hadn't made that one mistake.”

"Weren't you frightened?" Gary asked.

Her eyes widened slightly and she nodded.

"I heard voices," she said. "Voices coming out of space, out of the void that lies between the galaxies. Things talking over many light-years with one another. Things to which the human race, intellectually, would appear mere insects. At first I was frightened, frightened at the things they said, at the horrible hints I sensed in the things I couldn't understand.

Then, growing desperate, I tried to talk back to them, tried to attract their attention. I wasn't afraid of them any more and I thought that they might help. I didn't care much what happened any more just so someone, or something, would help me. Even take notice of me. Anything to let me know that I wasn't all alone.”

Gary lit his pipe again and silence fell for just a space. "Voices," said Herb.

They all stared out at that darkness that hemmed them in. Gary felt the hairs bristle at the nape of his neck. Some cold wind from far away had brushed against his face, an unnamable terror out of the cosmos reaching out for him, searching for him with dirty-taloned thoughts. Things that hurled pure thought across the deserts of emptiness that lay between the galaxies.

"Tell me," said Caroline, and her voice, too, seemed to come from far away, "how did the war come out?”

"The war?" asked Gary. Then he understood.

"Oh, the war," he said. "Why, Earth and Mars finally won out. Or so the histories claim. There was a battle out near Ganymede and both fleets limped home badly beaten up. The Jovians went back to Jupiter, the Earth-Mars fleet pulled into Sandebar on Mars. For months the two inner planets built up their fleets and strengthened home defenses. But the Jovians never came out again and our fleets didn't dare carry the war to the enemy. Even today we haven't developed a ship that dares go into Jupiter's atmosphere. Our geosectors might take us there and bring us back, but you can't use them near a planetary body. They work on the principle of warping space…”

"Warping space?" asked the girl, suddenly sitting upright.

"Sure," said Gary. "Anything peculiar about it?" "No," she said, "I don't suppose there is.”

Then: "I wouldn't exactly call that a victory.”

"That's what the histories call it." Gary shrugged. "They claim we run the Jovians to cover and they've been afraid to come out ever since. Earth and Mars have taken over Jupiter's moons and colonized them, but to this day no one has sighted a Jovian or a Jovian ship. Not since that day back in 5980.

"It's just one of them things," Herb decided for them.

The girl was staring out at space again. Hungry for seeing, hungry for living, but with the scars of awful memories etched into her brain.

Gary shivered to himself. Alone, she had taken her gamble and had won. Won against time and space and the brutality of man and the great indifference of the mighty sweep of stars.

What had she thought of during those long years? What problems had she solved? What kind of a person could she be, with her twenty-year-old body and her thousand-year-old brain?

Gary nursed the hot bowl of his pipe between his hands, studying the outline of her head against the vision-plate. Square chin, high forehead, the braided strands wrapped around her head.

What was she thinking now? Of that lover who now would be forgotten dust?

Of how he might have tried to find her, of how he might have searched through space and failed? Or was she thinking of the voices… the voice talking back and forth across the gulfs of empty space?

The spacewriter, sitting in its own dark corner, broke into a gibbering chatter.

Gary sprang to his feet.

"Now what?" he almost shouted.

The chattering ceased and the machine settled into the click-clack of its message.

Gary hurried forward. The other two pressed close behind, looking over his shoulder.

NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. KINGSLEY REPORTS RECEIVING STRANGE MESSAGES FROM SOMEWHERE OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM. UNABLE, OR UNWILLING, TO GUESS AT SOURCE. REFUSES TO GIVE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH MESSAGES WERE RECEIVED OR CONTEXT OF THEM, IF IN FACT HE KNOWS CONTEXT. URGENT THAT YOU GET STATEMENT FROM HIM SOONEST. REGARDS. EVENING ROCKET.

The machine's stuttering came to an end.’

The three stared at one another.

"Messages," said Herb. "Messages out of space.”