Aberrant Dreams - Speculative Fiction

ou see the stars, and you think you see lights, candles in the vast darkness. The stars lie. They’re fires, churning, hateful fires, burning themselves down to cinders. Their purpose, the goal of it, is to turn all into blackness. Out there where I’ve been, that’s all that’s left.

There are no seasons on board the ships that move among the stars. You can’t afford the imprecision. A constant temperature means safety as well as comfort. It means insulation against the extremes of cold and heat that characterize the universe. Only if something goes terribly wrong do seasons come to the great ships. Winter came to the Pegasus. It invaded my dreams, too.

I dragged myself from a snowbound sleep of wintry dreams, barely aware of the buzzing alarm that woke me.

I got carefully from under the covers, hoping the sound hadn’t wakened Hesabeth who slept beside me. But before I could shut the sound off, I saw her eyes open. “Stay here,” I told her. “If you’re needed I’ll call you.”

She was the ship’s data analyst. She’d concluded a long, dreary shift just hours ago, and I doubted this call was important. She closed her eyes and rolled over. I dressed quickly, heavy shirt and jeans. Over my shirt I pulled a brown sweater before slipping through the door into the corridor. The corridor lights were dim and feeble, the ship silent except for the sound of my booted feet on the decking. The temperature was as weak as the light. The ship’s air tasted thin and metallic to my tongue. But then how much longer would I or anyone else aboard this ship actually be able to taste it? Not long, I feared. The ship was dying slowly, though not slowly enough.

My name is Auric Soble, and I was captain of the Pegasus, not by choice or even appointment, but by curse. The real captain was dead, killed in the explosion of the drive engine that wrecked the ship. I had been eighth in seniority. Only two of the officers who outranked me had survived, one of them so injured it was a mercy when he died two days later. The other one, the ship’s drive engineer, felt the accident was his fault. More likely it wasn’t; most likely it was just one of those things that ride on the crest of probability and catch hold of you every now and again when your luck runs out. But it was the drive that exploded, and the drive was his responsibility, and he had not been present as he should have been when things went wrong. He was with us a week longer than the other officer and then without a word, without leaving a note or giving us any clue to why he felt the need, he stepped out of the airlock. His corpse trailed alongside our broken ship like a bloated satellite. Or ghost, depending on how you looked at it.

And so I became captain against my will. I had been senior technician. To tell the truth, I still was, for all the good I was doing as captain. But I had no choice, did I? No one else wanted the job.

Not that I did, you understand. But I had the seniority. It was my badge, worn like an albatross or cross around my neck.

As I reached the access well, I heard a sound, not quite a noise, behind me. I looked back and saw the tall, lanky figure of the Aihai. In the dim corridor light, he was just a silhouette, moving with disjointed alien grace toward the ladder I was already climbing. The Aihai was our only extraterrestrial crewmember and though one or two could get by in its language, nobody left alive spoke it fluently. That was just one of the skills the captain’s death deprived us of. I didn’t recall ever even hearing the being’s name; all of us just called him “Aihai” and he seemed content with that. He knew a bit of English – more of it than I knew of his language, that was for sure – and always seemed to understand what his duties were, but I had never heard him speak in any Terrestrial tongue. For that matter, only rarely did I hear him speak at all, and that was to the captain once in what I presumed to be his own speech, when he needed some clarification on something or other. The captain answered him in plain English. The Aihai was one of the ship’s astronomers and mathematicians, working navigation. What he had to say to anyone could normally be displayed on a computer screen or jotted in math terms on a scratch pad.

The well was narrow and dark with circular rungs for climbing. It was only a short distance up to the bridge. I climbed out on the deck, and there sat Bennet, who had the watch. He was in a swivel chair toward the rear of the room, rear being the area of the bridge (and the ship for that matter) that was away from the direction in which the ship moved when it moved normally. There was an array of various types of viewscreens there tracking a wide range of information, much of it ambient and environmental. Normally, his post was forward, near the twisted metal and blackened area that marked where the chief pilot had died, where the telltales kept track of our fading power resources, which were of more urgent interest than anything else these days.

It was quiet on the bridge except for the crackle of background noise from the stars, the only thing we could pick up on our receivers. Receivers which we kept open all the time in hope of hearing some signal which we knew we had no possible chance of hearing this far out.

“What’s going on?” I asked. It couldn’t be anything vital because he had simply called me with a buzzer, rather than speaking to me over the intercom.

Bennet was a bit past middle age, the oldest survivor on the ship. He was a pilot, though he was not a member of the bridge crew. Still he was a pilot. “Take a look for yourself.” He gestured at one of the screens and got out of the chair so I could have it. I slipped in, scouring the screen and seeing nothing at first. It was just a picture of blackness scattered with stars.

Then I saw the near-object indicator right below the screen. It read that there was mass close by. I glanced back at the image and realized something was wrong about the stars.

Something blocked them. It was just a hulk, a patch of blackness in space, blotting out the background. I read the indicators below the screen more carefully.

The Aihai came onto the deck. In the light I could see its lank, barrel-chested body and its wrinkled, dour, unhappy face in detail. Like everyone else, it was losing weight from a rationed diet. It crouched down on its haunches and watched us.

“A rogue asteroid, maybe.” Bennet’s tone was matter-of-fact, his manner unconcerned.

“Not with those readings.” I tapped the face of the indicator because I didn’t trust what I was seeing. But unless the detectors were haywire, I was seeing it correctly. “It’s a ship.”

Bennet shook his head, unable to bring himself to believe. “It can’t be, Auric. That reading’s got to be wrong.”

“They all agree and there’s too much redundancy for all of them to go off whack at the same time.”

“Then we’re reading it wrong. Odds of us running into another ship this far from the closest star is just too high to even think about. It would have to be a derelict too. More likely the readings are an aberration. Out here-”

I got up and went forward to the control console where I could more easily access the most sophisticated astronomical array that we normally only used for navigation. The Aihai realized what I was doing and got there before me, calling up the readings he knew I would want to see on the screens. He stood behind me and read them over my shoulder, and I heard him grunt. I suppose it was an indication of surprise; I know I was surprised. Without taking my eyes off the screens, I told Bennet, “This is no derelict.”

“Unless the power readings are haywire, too,” I said. I could barely get the words out.

Bennet came over and gave the screens a glance. I heard his breath catch and then he leaned forward and examined the screens again. “This isn’t possible,”he said.

I jabbed the call button and said, “Hesabeth? Better get up to the bridge. We have something you need to take a look at.”

Hesabeth arrived a few minutes later. None of our readings were contradicting my conclusions. I showed her the indicators, and she eased herself into a chair in front of a keyboard and spent a few minutes examining and crosschecking the data. “It’s a ship,” she said. “Auric, how can it be a ship out here?”

“Those readings indicate a power source. And under control. It has to be a ship. One in good order. Has it hailed us?”

I didn’t answer her. The standard distress call was broadcasting and had been since the accident. Perhaps that was what had attracted the ship. But why wasn’t it answering our distress signal? I moved to the captain’s console, sat down, and keyed the radio and spoke into it. There was no answer. Three times I spoke and three times I got no reply.

The ship was almost two hundred kilometers away and moving toward us. It was not moving at a very fast clip by interstellar standards. It would take another half-hour to reach us. The screens still had not given us a good look at it, even at that short distance. It was just a black blotch against the stars. Non-visual readings showed a rounded tubular shape that I did not recognize as clearly characteristic of any of the space-going cultures I was familiar with, though in general, such a shape is not uncommon for the ships of many of them. The information banks in our computers seemed to know no more about the thing than I did. I sat in my captain’s chair for several long minutes trying to decide what to do.

It is amazing how small your own thoughts can feel, how faint they sound in the emptiness, when you are so distant from the life you know, when the life you have is so certain of ending. Even now I could not bring myself to think of this ship as rescue. For one thing, if it was a ship from some unknown civilization, we could not reasonably predict its purpose or action. And it was certainly behaving oddly in not answering our distress signal. I could tell from the information I had on it that its technology was not too vastly different from some others familiar to us. It was radiating in the proper spectrum for radio communication, for one thing, though we still were not receiving any signal clearly aimed at us. I sat for several minutes in my captain’s chair, struggling with the chaos of my thoughts, trying to order them so that I might decide something.

After a time I turned around and told Bennet, “Wake the crew. Tell them what’s going on and have them go to their stations.”

We were far from the closest star system. On conventional propulsion, it would take us seventy-eight years to reach it, and it was not even inhabited. But, despite that we were in the midst of the explored galaxy, there was not a star system within a hundred light years that was not mapped and catalogued. A dozen major civilizations existed in that area. Yet this ship did not reply to our signal, and none of us recognized its configuration. It came toward us, obviously aware of us, and we prepared for it. I thought of countless scenarios to explain its behavior and dismissed them all as absurd, wishful or fantastic.

In the midst of the civilized galaxy we were still too far from any one star to benefit from its light.

The ship came closer, close enough for us to see it. But still it was dark and vague. It must have been painted black. We could make it out only in the way it blocked out the stars and from the data provided us by our various non-visual detectors. It came to rest in relationship to the Pegasus at a distance of about four miles. And there it hung in the deeps of space. Still no signal came, no indication of life aboard it.

I suppose it was at this point that I really began to be fascinated by the vessel, whatever it was. I felt no fear of it, no dread, no nightmarish conviction that it held any menace for us. What I did feel was impatience. I wanted something to happen. I wanted explanations. All it did was sit there and do nothing. I felt a need for action.

The only possible action was to go there and find out what it was, what it was doing, what was going on. Why it was so silent. Was its crew dead? Then what had driven it across space to come to rest so close to us?

The Pegasus carried three shuttles, cargo movers really. But one of them had a housing with life support that would accommodate half a dozen people. I decided on five of us, which would leave three crewmembers aboard the Pegasus. It had been two days and the other ship had given no indication that it was a menace to us; it had in fact, shown no sign of interest in us other than the fact that it had come to where we were. I could ignore my own impatience no longer.

I was one of the five aboard the cargo mover of course, along with the Aihai, Bennet and a senior crewman named Park. Although I did not want to take Hesabeth into any situation that might be dangerous, she would not hear of being left behind. She had a point. Her data analysis skills made her the most logical of the survivors for this mission.

Bennet was included not only because it was his “discovery” but because he was also a pilot and we’d need him to operate the shuttle. Park was a former military man, now our life support technician with a second in contact protocol, which made his participation every bit as logical as Hesabeth’s. Because of his Army career, he had a range of knowledge not usual in life support techs. He was versed in theoretical physics, though hardly an expert, and he had been stationed on several remote planets. We were moving into unknown territory, with the likelihood of the ship having been built by a race we had not previously had contact with. Perhaps between the two of us we could make some sense at least of anything important that we found. Further, he had a grasp of several alien languages including a smattering of the Aihai’s. He could, with a modicum of difficulty, communicate with him, though not as well as the captain had been able to. I did not think at the time that that might be a valuable skill, or any kind of skill at all worth considering. I was wrong.

Four miles is nothing by astronomical standards, but a cargo mover is no passenger vehicle. The force of its reaction engines set up vibrations that seemed likely to shake the thing apart. The housing in which we rode was little more than a tin shack, though it was in good repair and certainly airtight. We wore our space suits, with our helmets off and close at hand should we need them. Of course, if there had been a sudden and catastrophic decompression, it might not matter how close at hand our helmets were.

There were lights mounted on the cargo mover, spotlights intended as an aid in locating orbiting cargo visually. As we neared the mysterious, silent ship, we got our first look at it. It was strangely prosaic, despite the immensity of its size. True, it was not like any ship any of us were familiar with, but examining it under our sweeping lights held few surprises. Its hull was dark, and the surface of the material was pocked and pitted as if it had gone through a meteor storm. Yet there appeared to be no real damage, no obvious damage or clutter of debris. It suggested that the pitting of the hull’s surface might be simply a characteristic of the material from which it was made.

The Aihai spoke a quick, fluid sentence and offered a cause for the irregularities that I had not thought of and which at the time I dismissed as unlikely. Park translated. “I think he says that the ship must be old, very old.”

I had no plans. We were here for a closer look at the ship and to determine if we could find any signs of life. But Hesabeth pointed at one of the screens. “What’s that?”

Ahead of us there seemed to be a large opening in the hull. It was rectangular and more than twice the size of the shuttle we were in. As we passed over it, we could see that it opened on a deep chamber that was apparently part of the ship’s interior.

“There was no opening in that ship’s hull a few minutes ago,” Bennet said. There was no sign of any door or panel set back from the opening. He added “They’re inviting us in I think.”

We passed over the opening and circumnavigated the ship. When we returned the opening still awaited us. I can not explain why I made the decision, but made it I did. “We’re going in,” I said.

The shuttle slid through the opening to the deck below. Artificial gravity from the bigger ship took hold of us, but Bennet seemed unfazed as he guided the cargo mover to the deck. We settled with a slight bump, and for a moment, no one said anything. Then the Aihai unbuckled himself from his chair and went to the airlock hatch to open it.

No one spoke up to protest. We were all suited up anyway, standard procedure when riding in the flimsy cab of a cargo mover. Bennet snapped on his helmet, sealed it, and got out of his chair and followed the Aihai. The rest of us stared dumbly. Bennet closed the hatch behind the two of them; it cycled and opened again two minutes later with them outside the shuttle. By that time I was out of my chair with my helmet sealed over my head, and the others took my lead. In another two minutes, we were outside the shuttle, too.

The gravity, which was possibly residual from the artificial gravity generators inside the alien ship – assuming that they projected gravitational attraction in a way similar to the method we used – wasn’t much, but it held our shuttle and our feet to the deck. The Aihai was already moving toward what looked like an entrance into the ship. I followed him.

We found a panel, about two meters square, its bottom flush with the deck, inset into the wall about the same depth our own hatches were. In the center there was a sort of lever. The Aihai fiddled with it a moment, then turned it a short distance clockwise. Through the soles of my boots, I could feel the deck vibrating. That lasted somewhat more than half a minute then the door moved. It simply jerked forward then lifted up out of the way. We were staring into the alien ship.

The Aihai started in. “Do you think that’s wise?” I asked through the suit radio. He said nothing but there might have been a shrug beneath the bulkiness of the suit. To the others I said, “Hesabeth, you and Park stay here with the ship.”

“You can come if you want to,” I said. It occurred to me it would probably be smarter to leave him with the ship rather than Park, but by then it was too late. We were inside the airlock, and the hatchway closed, sealed, and the chamber filled with atmosphere.

Lights came on. Ordinary light, suggesting that wherever this ship came from, it was a planet that circled a sun much like Sol. The airlock walls were grayish brown. The cycling ended, and the inner door popped open. I cautiously poked my head in and saw a corridor with walls of the same gray-brown color as the airlock. If that color scheme were as prevalent as it seemed to be, this would not be a cheerful ship for human beings. I had no idea how the Aihai felt about it.

When I glanced back at him he was already popping the seal on his helmet. I started to protest but his helmet came off and he stood there, breathing whatever it was our new hosts breathed. I glanced at the analysis array on my left wrist and the readings suggested an atmosphere not much different from the one inside our ship. I could have told the same thing from just looking at the Aihai.

“The array doesn’t tell you much about the biological content of the air here,” Bennet said.

“Too late to worry about that,” I said. The seal was already released, air hissing through the seam. I lifted the helmet off and took a deep breath.

It was better air than the stuff I’d been breathing on the Pegasus where the recyclers were, if not on their last legs, certainly limping. There was none of the metallic taste you get used to aboard starships. And it was warm, comfortably warm, in that room. About ten degrees warmer than in the Pegasus. There’d be no dreams of snowfall on this ship.

The scale of things inside the ship was close to the scale of our own, which we took to mean that whoever built the ship was of about the same size as us. In short, it was likely that if we found furniture, we could use it. The air was breathable, air pressure and temperature comfortable. There was nothing evident to prove that the ship had not come from Earth or one of our colonized worlds, except that it appeared to be constructed of materials none of us had ever seen before, and it just plain seemed and felt wrong. We discovered, with a little experimentation that our radios worked sufficiently well inside the ship, that we could safely wander apart for short distances and stay in communication with one another. We spent the better part of the next two hours exploring, careful that no one got too far from the others.

We moved forward and found empty compartment after empty compartment. The walls of the compartments were gray--dark gray. The light seemed to come from the ceiling, though we found nothing other than the ceiling itself which we could point to as a source. We found no living creatures, no personal items that could be held up as indicating there was any living creature aboard this ship except ourselves. From all the evidence we could produce, the ship seemed abandoned.

We found the bridge. It was the only room of the ones we had looked into that had apparent instrumentation. There were screens showing the stars. We could even see the Pegasus on one of them, not close enough to show details, but there nonetheless.

I walked about like a man in a dream looking at the images on the screens. The stars they showed were the same stars I knew, the same I had seen everyday since the accident aboard the Pegasus. But it was different. There seemed to be no mechanism for the screens. They were simply places on the bulkhead where the images appeared. They had the same intensity and brightness as the images I was familiar with, but there was no material screen involved. Just patches on the wall. Yet these images were not projected. They simply were.

Yet there was no one to tend them. And at that thought, I realized something else. While there were things that might have been instruments there were no indicators. No markings or symbols to gauge those instruments. Nothing that might be numbers or letters.

We needed Park and Hesabeth’s ideas about all this, so we called them, and the Aihai went back to the airlock to lead them in. They wandered about the room and looked at the screens and equipment but discerned little more about it than Bennet and I had.

It was a feeble enough joke, but I laughed. Hesabeth said, “Do you suppose they ate each other? That might explain a lot.”

“Nothing explains anything,” I said. I looked around at the others. “Does anyone feel a threat?”

“Nothing like that,” Hesabeth said, gazing at a screen, her arms folded across her chest. Her face was blank. “Perhaps we aren’t psychic.”

Park seemed surprised by the question. He shrugged, then said, “We have a ship that seems empty. We have air, a good temperature.”

“The air is moist,” Bennet said. “There must be a source of water on board the ship. We need to take a closer look at some of the compartments we looked at before.”

“If we could find water,” she said. “It’s warm here. The Pegasus is dying. If we remain there, we’ll all die in a matter of weeks.”

“Of course we should look around a little more closely,” said Bennet. “I don’t feel exactly safe. Does anyone?”

“Why should that be important? The point is, I don’t see any kind of real threat, any actual physical threat.”

“Look,” Hesabeth said. “It’s warm here. The gravity and air is in our range, and the life support system on this ship appears to be working well. This ship isn’t damaged like the Pegasus. If we can find water, I see no reason we shouldn’t move over here.”

“For that reason,” said Park, “why stop with just food? If we don’t find water, we can bring over equipment from the Pegasus and manufacture our own.”

Even Bennet seemed to be softening. “And if we can figure out how to run this thing, we might be able to go home.”

“You mean it?” I said. “You actually think, all of you, that we should consider moving over here?”

“Not exactly,” Hesabeth said. “Well, yes, I guess I do. We should consider it. If this ship is what it appears to be, it could save all our lives. We simply can’t survive on the Pegasus much longer."

I was astounded. I was also scared. I said, “Well, yes, I suppose that much makes sense. But–” I looked around and noticed something. “Where’s that Aihai?”

We found him in a room two doors away. He was standing looking at a small basin near the rear wall of the room. The basin was filling with water.

He cupped his hands and dipped water from the basin, which he lifted to his mouth and drank. He looked around at us as if just noticing our arrival. His hands parted, letting the remaining portion of the water fall back into the basin with a splash. He gestured and stepped away. Before I could intervene, Park took up the implied invitation.

We just stood there. After a moment, Park looked around. “It doesn’t seem to have hurt either of us,” he said.

I thought, “Isn’t it a little soon for such assumptions?” But I couldn’t bring myself to think that he was wrong. This ship, whatever was behind it, was taking care of us. But why?

I went forward and drank some of it myself. It was much better than the water we were manufacturing on the Pegasus. That simply, and perhaps foolishly, settled the question.

Bennet took the cargo mover back to the Pegasus for the rest of the crew and the food. I felt uneasy about this strange, alien derelict but I felt just as uneasy, if not more so, about the Pegasus. The explosion that destroyed the drive had damaged much else throughout the ship. Its power station and the life-support systems were failing. It was just a matter of time until the environmental processors would be unable to support life. From that perspective, leaving the Pegasus seemed our only choice.

We found a room that appeared to have been intended as a galley, though it had no stores. We gave it ours. The crewmembers brought over clothing and personal items, as well as special equipment including food preparation equipment, and extra spacesuits.

The next day, Park and the Aihai began to explore the alien ship. Bennet, Hesabeth and I spent hour after hour in what we thought of as the control room trying to figure things out.

Nowhere were the ship’s alien origins more obvious than in its controls. They seemed to have eschewed such human eccentricities as levers, dials or buttons. We were careful to avoid touching anything that might activate the ship’s drive, whatever the ship’s drive was, and we made no progress toward understanding much less figuring out how to pilot the ship. We found no way to remove any panels-–there seemed to be no panels-–so that we could look into the mechanism of the controls. So far as that goes, we found no evidence that the controls had any mechanism behind them. We hoped that Park or the Aihai might find the engine room or some other clue to the drive, and all the time we hoped for that, our frustration mounted.

We completed moving into the black ship in three days, bringing all our food and medical stores, most of the necessary personal items, some portable equipment including computers, cooking equipment and other such items. Much, of course, could be left behind since we could return to the ship and bring over anything we discovered suddenly that we needed.

Or so we thought. On our fourth day aboard the black ship, Park noticed we were moving.

There was no sensation of acceleration, no sound of powerful engines. But in the screens, the Pegasus was farther away. A few tests showed him the stars had shifted. The ship had changed its direction, too. We were headed away from any civilized world we knew of.

The ship had not yet reached interstellar speed but it was still accelerating. Park’s figures were little more than estimates, which he could hone to greater accuracy with a little more time, but it was obvious the speed was increasing. He thought the black ship would be close to light speed within a day. Heading toward an unknown--to say nothing of incomprehensible-–destination.

The dreams began soon after. They were not the dreams of cold winters on my native world. They were dreams filled with a violet haze in which I visited strange places, saw incomprehensible landscapes, felt sensations I cannot describe nor understand. Seas of fire, great mountains or ice glittering beneath suns of green and yellow and gold and red. At times I stood in the midst of those landscapes, at others I flew above them. I had no idea where these landscapes were or why I was there or what these dreams meant, assuming they meant anything. There was a haziness and uncertainty to them so that I was not, in those early days of frightfulness, sure that I correctly recalled them when I was awake. The only thing I knew for sure is that I woke up drenched in sweat, sitting up in bed, disturbing the sleep of Hesabeth with my movement, for I did not cry out. She comforted and reassured me, or tried to, and urged me to go back to sleep. I feared going back to sleep, though eventually I did, and I seldom dreamed a second time during any period of night.

Why I feared, I cannot tell you. I saw nothing in those dreams to fear, at least as far as I recall. Yet the dreams were as drenched with the atmosphere of dread as I was with sweat when I woke. Dear Hesabeth, sweet Hesabeth. Did you dream, too?

She never asked about my dreams. I never asked her if she dreamed; I never asked anyone.

I have said the ship was big. We found stairways leading to lower levels, prosaic, ordinary stairways, their risers proportionately close to what we might use back on Earth. The rooms on the level below us were pretty much the same as most of the rooms we had found on the upper level. There was nothing to distinguish them as to purpose or design, but the crew, Park and the Aihai, especially, searched them systematically and diligently. We were convinced by now that there was someone or something on the ship guiding it with some sort of purpose, and we were determined to solve that mystery. The fact is we had to. The ship had given us air and water, but no food. What we had brought from the Pegasus was limited. If we continued moving toward empty, unexplored space, our food would give out and we would starve.

My dreams changed. I found myself looking not across a landscape of unbelievable strangeness but into space itself. Stars blazed against the occult blackness in fantastic numbers packed together more closely than in the part of the galaxy we were in.

And something moved among them, across them, in front of them. Dark and indistinct but vaguely man-shaped, blotting out the stars behind it.

It came towards me, and all of a sudden, I knew what it was I dreaded. It was this, this thing that I had never seen before but which I was seeing now in a dream. For this was no dream. It was real, I knew it was, though on a different level of reality than I had ever before experienced, perhaps more real than anything else I had ever known. It was a part of space, containing in itself every form there was and no form at all. It moved across the stars, then paused, half turning toward me in the vagueness of its outline. I could see no face, no eyes, no features whatsoever, but I knew it looked at me. I froze with terror. The black, gigantic man-shape came toward me.

In my mind I heard a sound like thunder, and I shook as if ground were shaking beneath my feet. The man-shape bent toward me. And in my mind, I heard it speak.

I tried to speak, but the great fear that gripped me made that impossible. The thing I faced in my dream said Leave again.

I could not speak. I tried to tell the thing I would leave if there was any way; but there was not. I said nothing but the thing seemed to know what I intended. It leaned toward me once again, a horrifying thing that tore my soul with fear. It said, There is a door. Find it.

I managed to speak, and in my dream I was not hindered by the lack of air in space. I said, “Where is the door? Do you mean the airlocks? We can’t leave the ship. We’ll die.”

Suddenly, my whole body felt cold, not the cold of either winter or fear but a different, more frightening cold that seemed to grow from within me, to spring outward from my very soul, if I have such a thing. It seemed the darkness that blotted out the stars had reached for me and grabbed me, and I was being thrown aloft. I flew among the stars, suddenly gigantic in my own right, one with them, but unable to control my movements. I flew between and among them and then saw I was flying toward a huge man-shaped blackness and I could discern no feature in it save one. Its mouth. Its gigantic mouth opened to swallow me. I screamed and something jerked my whole being, like a cord tied to my foot, and I fell and hit something cold and hard. I yelped in pain and rolled, coming up hard against a bulkhead. I lay there uncomprehending for a moment and then I realized someone was talking to me. It was Park, I knew his voice. I saw his face, and behind him the face of the Aihai.

“Are you all right, Soble?” Park said. “What happened? Why are you here?”

I muttered something incomprehensible even to me, and tried to stand up. Park held my arm to steady me. I looked around. I seemed to be in one of the corridors of the ship--judging by the materials and coloring of the walls–-but it was different from the corridors I knew. It was broader, the ceiling higher. The doors were not spaced so close as in the corridors I had been in.

I was wearing shorts and nothing else. Park said, “Have you been sleepwalking?”

“Third level. The Aihai and I started exploring it earlier today. It’s different from the upper two levels. The rooms are larger, more varied. They seem to have different purposes, but don’t ask me what they are.” He looked at me, his expression one of puzzlement. “Have you been sleepwalking?” he asked again.

I avoided a real answer by saying, “Evidently.” Though how I could have gotten here without waking myself was beyond my understanding. The Aihai said something.

Park gave him a quick glance, then looked back at me. “There’s a room that seems to especially fascinate him,” he said. “It’s through that door. He wants you to see it. You might find it...well, astonishing, yourself.” With a tone that suggested several emotions at once, among them puzzlement, he added, “I know I did.”

The room they led me into was the largest we had seen on the ship and the least sane. The walls were gray but a lighter gray than the other parts of the ship, almost pearl. But the color of the walls was the least interesting feature about them.

Etched on those walls were thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of figures, some neat, some scrawled wildly as if in several different hands, all in characters I had never seen before. They were arranged in orderly patterns that suggested to me immediately that they were calculations of some sort. They were astonishing in their sheer numbers and complexity. Mixed among the generally orderly figures were lines both straight and curved that hurt my eyes to look at. It was as if they pointed to something, but not to something that was actually present. That is, at least not present in any universe I knew of. “My god,” I said. “What is this?”

“We’ve been in here three or four hours and I still don’t know,” said Park. “But he seems to.”

The Aihai was staring at a portion of the wall. He reached out and with a long, gnarled finger, traced a set of figures. He touched but did not trace one of the lines.

I have never been able to gauge emotion in his voice or manner. To me the Aihai seemed always dour, pensive, un-trustful not of people but the universe. He turned his head and his great, dark eyes gazed at me.

The Aihai turned his attention back to the wall and the figures on it, but Park said to me, “Is something wrong?”

I described my dream to him. He stood there listening, a look of incomprehension on his face. The Aihai watched me also but he watched me more calmly, possibly with understanding. I described the dark, manlike thing that I dreamed had spoken to me. When I was done the Aihai nodded and spoke a single word.

The room was oddly shaped, roughly rectangular, but to my eye in an off-kilter way that made no sense when I tried to analyze it. After a while, I quit trying.

I sat there on the floor of the room and wondered what was happening to me. Park sat next to me. After a time he said, “Do you know much about the Aihai?”

“They’re from Mars” I said. “I’ve never been to Mars; even today it’s restricted. For that matter, it’s been years since I was even back in the Solar System for more than two or three weeks at a time. I know some things generally about them, but in a real sense, no I don’t.”

“I studied it in school. It’s the reason travel to Mars is restricted.” I thought a moment, then lamely added. “I wasn’t born then.”

It was a bit of a surprise, but not that much. Some alien races are quite long-lived, and unless you know them very well, it’s hard to judge about things like that just from looking.

Park went on. “The Possession was about half a century ago. Alien beings we still know very little about, took over portions of the Earth and all of Mars, and the smaller moon of Neptune. It’s widely believed they also took over Pluto and Quaoar, and portions of Xena among the outer planets. They occupied several other planets and moons outside the solar system. I think close to a dozen star systems were involved.”

“I remember my history,” I said. “On Earth they took over part of the northeastern coast of North America, from just below the Miskatonic Valley in Massachusetts up into Canada, almost to the Arctic Circle. That’s what they mean by the Stolen Land, isn’t it?”

Park nodded. “Along with parts of Australia and Antarctica, which they possessed. They still occupy parts of those regions. But we managed to drive them off Mars about twenty years ago, Quaoar and Xena shortly after that. For some reason their hold on those worlds wasn’t as strong as it was in North America or on Pluto.

“During my time in the Army, I was stationed on Mars. When we reclaimed the place, we found that portions of it were changed. There was a heavier atmosphere and various life forms, most of them vegetable, had been introduced. But there were also ancient primitive cities inhabited by the creatures that call themselves Aihai. They claim to have been there for many thousands of years, and some of the buildings and ruins in their cities suggest they have. Yet they were not there before the Possession, not at least in any form we could recognize. For whatever reason and by whatever means, the Great Old Ones had brought them to Mars. And they had done it in such a way that the Aihai were unaware they were alien to the world.”

“Don’t ask me. There’s not a lot of information floating around about them, even on Mars. Including Mars I’ve been on two of the Recovered Worlds, and I’ve seen enough to know the Great Old Ones are no myth. They changed that planet. They gave it a heavier atmosphere; they somehow managed to increase the planet’s temperature, and though it’s still a desert, they added several forms of plant life to the place and some creatures, most of them monstrous in one way or another. And they brought the Aihai, the Shambleu and others. Since no one knows how they did all this, don’t expect me to.”

“You mean is there a point to all this talk? Yes there is. The Great Old Ones somehow brought the Aihai to Mars from somewhere else and did it without them being aware of it, or us for that matter until we recovered the world. Either that or they created them out of nothing.”

He was silent a moment, then went on. “There’s not a lot of information. There aren’t very many official reports on the Possession or how we overthrew them, which we’ve done on portions of Earth and most of the three Stolen Worlds. I’m too young to have participated in the liberation but I was stationed on the planet, and I saw things. Heard things, too.

“Apparently we had the aid of another alien race or group, one not generally known to the public, but that’s only a rumor as far as I know, and I couldn’t tell you anything about it. But there are a lot of rumors about the Great Old Ones, rumors or legends. One of the legends is that they could travel from dimension to dimension by utilizing an esoteric form of geometry that revealed certain intersecting angles of differing areas and types of space.”

“Those figures are etched or carved on the walls, not scrawled. I’m not claiming anything. I really don’t know a lot. But I’m a little older than you and I’ve been to a lot of places. I’ve heard things about the Great Old Ones and other, related beings. There are books that I’ve heard of that hold a lot of lore about them, too, though I’ve never seen any of them. Like the Necronomicon and the Nova Texts. I’ve even heard the names of some of those creatures. Cthulhu. Black Pharol. Vulthoom. Tsathoggua. Their apparent ruler, Azathoth, who is supposed to live in the very center of universal chaos. And Nyarlathotep.”

“Yes,” said Park. “It would seem our crewmate believes you had a dream in which you held conversation with one of the Outer Gods.”

“I barely speak his language. It’s possible I misunderstand,” Park said slowly. “He claims the writing on these walls is Aihai.”

“They are. But they’re also an ancient people despite the fact we know nothing of their origins. They claim to have traveled space many hundreds of years ago and to have had rather an advanced technical culture, all lost to them now.”

“Apparently. They haven’t been in space – so they believe – for centuries until we found them on Mars. According to the Aihai – again, this is if I correctly understand him – not everything written on this wall is formula. There is a section over there that he says is a – text, I suppose you can call it. Or narrative. It’s just a small section over there. It’s written in an archaic form of the Aihai language, but he seems to be able to read it, though with difficulty.”

“More or less. He’s trying to figure out the math now. He says the crew of an Aihai ship discovered this ship. There’s no way of knowing how long ago.”

“The ship was abandoned. The Aihai says they never found a crew. But they did find something. The figures on the wall indicate what they found.”

“We’ve only started on the figures. They are not confined to a small section of the wall.”

“I’m not mathematician enough that I’ll ever know what these formulas mean even if I can learn the system they’re written in.”

“Then we don’t know what the Aihai – the Aihai crew, I mean – are supposed to have found? Assuming there ever were any Aihai?”

“No. The whole thing could be our crewmate’s delusion, or a simple misinterpretation on his part as far as that goes.”

He was silent a moment, then shrugged and continued. “But let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s not a mistake. The written language is ancient. I gather, as I said, he can barely read it and there are parts he isn’t sure of at all. But he thinks it says that the Aihai spacefarers were trapped on this ship, much as we were. They never found the ship’s crew, just as we haven’t found them. Or any other living things. Some of them died. He’s not sure about that part, but it seems the deaths were mysterious. They found this room and the lines and angles on the wall. It was a clue to a great technology or science or something, I really don’t know what. Our Aihai thinks the crewmembers are responsible for the formulas. Apparently there was one among them who was more of a scientist than the others, and he worked all this out.”

Across that alien room I could see the Aihai, staring intently at a series of lines that seemed both to point and not point to a corner.

Later that day Hesabeth, trying to determine where the black ship was taking us, concluded that it was moving in a great curving orbit. We had no clue as to what was causing the ship’s course to curve that way. We had thought the ship to be in free fall because its acceleration had, so far as we were able to determine, been constant for several hours. There was no object exerting the necessary gravitational force close enough to account for what was happening. One possible conclusion was that the ship’s drive operated on principles and perhaps even forces unknown to and undetectable by us.

We continued like that through the next day, but early on the third, the ship changed course. Hesabeth had to do the astronomical figures herself, because Park and the Aihai would not tear themselves away from the strange room where they had shown me the alien calculations. There seemed to be no purpose to the change of course, no star or other feasible destination in the region we were moving toward. Later on that day, the ship changed course yet again. Still we had no clue to our possible destination. It was as if the ship were merely describing senseless and unexplainable maneuvers in space.

I continued dreaming about space when I slept, which was not often. I floated in nothingness, surrounded by the gleaming brilliant stars of yellow and red and blazing white. I could not see my arms or legs nor determine exactly how I moved. There was the violet light which I often sensed rather than saw. Sometimes, a dark distant figure passed across the stars but Nyarlathotep, as I now thought of it, did not speak to me again. Even so, I woke from these dreams shaking and sweating, and Hesabeth without asking questions would hold and comfort me. The cold of space seemed to settle permanently in my being.

We continued to search the ship and found no new clues regarding where it came from or how it had been built or how it worked. The ship continued to furnish us with air we could breathe and water we could drink. The temperature stayed comfortable. But we found no food. The stores we had brought with us from the Pegasus were dwindling and could not last us longer than two months.

An argument broke out between Agoncillo and Cermak, two of the crewmen, and might have led to a fight had not others intervened. The matter was witnessed by Bennet and Sams, who agreed that Agoncillo began things by accusing Cermak of stalking him. I tried to talk with Agoncillo, who seemed agitated and incoherent. Someone, he said, was stalking him in his dreams. Someone or something. He spoke of shrieking abysses, of a vague yet all-pervading violet light, of a sense of flying and falling at the same time, of the blazing stars. His words were a garble of disorganized thoughts and images. When I tried to ask him questions, he got to his feet and walked off. We never saw Agoncillo again.

If our nerves were on edge, they had been so for some time. But Agoncillo’s outburst about his nightmares brought our feelings to the fore. There were no more serious incidents that day, but tempers were short and people glared at one another. Of course, I could not avoid being struck by the fact that the obviously mad ravings of Agoncillo described my own dreams.

Though we had found no living thing aboard this ship, there was aboard it I now believed, a great evil. Moving here was a terrible mistake, one that might well destroy all of us. But not with the relatively clean and simple death we faced on the Pegasus. What we faced here was not cold, starvation and suffocation, but madness and violence and an unknown menace lurking at the edges of our awareness – at least the awarenesses of Agoncillo and myself.

Perhaps Hesabeth guessed about my dreams. I still dared not speak aloud of them.

That cowardice began to gnaw at me, because I saw no reason for it. Was the basis of my fear an expectation that I would be laughed at? That the others might question my capability to lead them? Or was it the conviction that the mere act of speaking of it might condemn me to the sort of insanity that had taken hold of poor Agoncillo? It could have been any of those reasons, and it might as easily have been another, less definable one as well.

We kept watches on the bridge. The ship piloted itself, and we discovered no way to interfere with it. But posting someone on watch at least gave us the satisfaction of doing something. Much of the equipment brought over from the Pegasus was set up there, and we could at least keep track of the ship’s movement with the navigational computers.

Hesabeth and I concluded our watch – the last one we would stand on the black ship as it turned out – and were headed back toward the cabin we had appropriated for ourselves, and there, outside our door, stood Park.

The feelings that gripped him were obvious. He leaned against the wall next to the door of our cabin, and as we approached, stood up and glanced our way. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his overalls. His face was grim and drawn, his dark eyes haunted. As we got closer, he said. “Come with me.”

He led us to the stairwell a short distance down the corridor. The stairs were a luxury compared to the access wells aboard the Pegasus with their metal rungs that circled the inside of their walls. We went down two flights and walked the short distance to the strange, great room with the inhuman formulas etched on its walls.

The Aihai stood straight not stooped or hunched over as he always was when I saw him before. He seemed grim and strong, and somehow more alien than ever. He turned to us and, pointing toward a corner of the room said in a rasping voice, “There is Nyarlathotep’s doorway.”

The Aihai stepped backwards toward the corner, and I can not tell you exactly what it was I saw then. There was a flickering of the air around him, a hint of the violet haze I had seen in my dreams and all at once he was gone. The part I cannot describe to you is the direction he moved in as he disappeared; it was as if he moved in more than one direction at once. Hesabeth gasped. I stepped forward reaching out toward where he had been standing. From somewhere I heard a voice, his, calling out. “The doorway!”

And then the air was crackling around me and I was engulfed by the light. Hesabeth called my name and I felt her hand on my shoulder. I kept going and she followed behind me, protesting, urging me back, but I was leaving the black ship and knew it, and not even she could stop me. There was a feeling of electricity crackling around me, and then I passed above strange twilight abysses, moving with fantastic speed amid kaleidoscopic images of incomprehensible shape and color. I reached back and grabbed for Hesabeth and felt her in my arms but could not see her. A sound of rushing filled my ears, and my head seemed about to split. She said my name over and over, and I heard Park’s voice also.

A great wall of clustered prisms rose up on my left and then veered off above us. I heard a sound like flapping wings, another like clawed feet running across stone. Something flashed ahead of us, then flashed again as it slipped under us, and we went past and beyond it. There was a soft, mournful sound in the air around us and ahead of us a shadow: the Aihai, I think. If so, the last sight of him I ever had. The shadow flitted away, downward then upward, at last to slide leftward and disappear into a cloud of flickering, clustered shadows that hung like smoke in nothingness for just a moment before bursting into a shower of yellow embers that died out quickly.

I believed – I felt I knew – he had found his way to his home, his Valhalla, whatever goal he had set himself, but it was not my goal. Ahead of me a patch of violet haze flickered. It was what I was searching for; I knew that even though I had not known I was searching for anything. Clutching Hesabeth’s arm I propelled us toward it. The flapping sound started up again, as if a flock of giant birds flew behind us. Park called to me but, his was like a voice in a dream that you know of but do not hear.

And then I think he screamed and screamed again and then fell silent and Hesabeth said, “Hurry, Auric. Hurry!”

We got closer and closer to the violet haze, and it engulfed and swallowed us, but the flapping sound grew louder and louder. I didn’t care. The elation of what was happening was all that mattered then. It was all that existed then.

And then it was gone, all of it, and I was falling. I had only time to gasp, and then I struck something hard. My chest slapped against something, and immediately after my head bounced against whatever it was my chest had struck. I could feel blood pouring down the side of my face. There was pounding in my ears, like the roaring of a great surf, but no other sound.

I looked up and saw two faces, human faces, a man and a woman. They stared at me, their expressions mixtures of disbelief and horror. Their mouths moved but I could not hear what they said because there was a ringing in my ears. I saw other people behind the two I had first seen. Humans, from Earth.

I was on a ship, a starship. I had traveled in some alien, incomprehensible method across space and found the path back to human space, to safety. “Hesabeth,” I said. “Hesabeth, we’ve found our way home.”

The people who faced me stood gaping. From their clothing, from the general appearance of the corridor I stood in, I guessed I was on a cargo ship of some sort. There was no way of telling what part of space the ship was in, or what its destination might be. Only that I was once again aboard a working, human ship. I got unsteadily to my feet.

I wiped the blood from my face. I heard a dripping sound beside me. Looking down, I saw a pool of blood on the floor. It was not close enough to be my own. I looked up.

Just below the overhead of the passage Hesabeth hung half in, half out of space. Her arms, her short dark hair, dangled above the floor. Her lifeless right hand dangled in front of me.

Unfeeling and uncomprehending, I stared at her. Her body jerked in space, as if something worried or gnawed at it from the other side.

Grabbing and reaching for her I tried to pull her away from whatever it was. Her blood drenched my shoulders and my head. People – I don’t know how many – grabbed me from behind, wrestled me away from her. I fought them but there were too many, and I was weak with shock; they dragged me away from her and others ran to pull her through if they could. I don’t remember anything after that for several days.

I never saw Park or the Aihai or any other member of the crew of the Pegasus again. I remember the sound of his screams and Hesabeth’s urgent admonition to me to hurry.

The Terran ship we reached – I reached – was the Bingham, out of Woomera, Australia. I was taken to the ship’s infirmary and sedated. I remained sedated while the ship completed its return to Earth where I was hospitalized for observation and treatment. After a while I was released, though there was never any pretense that I was recovered.

For a long time there were no dreams. Well, what of it? I had my memories; I had no need of dreams to bring me horror. Then I began to dream again. I dreamed of hazy, violet light. Of twisting, kaleidoscopic vistas spreading out before me. I saw vaulting prismatic clusters above and around me.

I saw stars, blazing gold and red and green, against the blackness of space. I saw patchy veils of nebula and gases.

And I saw that figure, no less black than space itself, which sometimes moved across the vast emptiness of the universe, blotting out the stars and nebulas behind it.

And in my dreams, those words are followed by the winter. The bitter cold of ice and snow and fear. Because I know there is a door. Here. On Earth.

I am close to madness and if I move any closer, I have no doubt that I will indeed look for such doors again. I will find one.