“Before you go, sir, we’ve a couple of things to report.
That new iron asteroid we picked up north of Nowhere—it’s gone again!”
He pointed to a red dot on the chart.
“Another thing, sir—before you go to dinner.”
I heard a dull echo of reproach in his hollow voice.
“The laser monitors have just picked up what seems to be a distress signal from that same direction.
No intelligible message, but we got what I think is part of the name of a ship.
I think it was something Quest.”
4 The Enemy Machine
In spite of such disquieting developments, I tried to carry an air of hearty confidence.
Of course the anomaly was dangerous, I reminded Ketzler. Its dangers were our business at Nowhere Near, and we were attending to them.
However tired or frightened or resentful, the duty crews were still at work.
Our undamaged instruments were still following what went on. The computer was still plotting.
The position rockets were fighting at full thrust to keep us out of Nowhere.
We could do no more.
Even if Habibula’s unlikely tale was true, even if the Quasar Quest was fighting for her life against the half-known forces in the anomaly, there was no help we could give. Our lean resources were fully committed.
If the cosmic menace of the anomaly had been ignored or underestimated, if our needs had been neglected, the errors had not been ours.
We could not correct them now.
Even to myself, I dared not admit that we were near a very desperate extremity.
Shrugging off Ketzler’s anxious question, I advised him to get some rest and went on to keep my date with Lilith Adams and Giles Habibula.
She had changed her severe white uniform for something blue and sheer, though she still wore that ugly, red-eyed skull.
Even at full-G, her motion had the flowing grace of flight.
She smiled and took my hand. Her touch lit rockets in me.
“Captain Ulnar, you are very kind.”
Her warm voice gave me a giddy feeling that the terrible disturbance of the anomaly had already swallowed me.
She was walking at my side, alluring in that translucent blue, yet somehow out of reach. Excitingly near and real, she was yet somehow wrapped in that untouchable aloofness that I could not understand.
“Giles has gone on to the mess hall for a snack before our tour,” she said. “Can we pick him up there?”
A pang of jealous speculation stabbed me.
If their queer tale was even partly true, if old Habibula was actually recovering his lost youth, it struck me that such a girl as Lilith Adams might be a more important part of the experiment than all his precious wine and caviar.
We found him in the mess hall.
Still appallingly unmilitary in the same blazing yellow sweater and the same shapeless fatigue pants, he was sitting at a table with our one remaining free companion, a plump redhead named Gina Lorth.
They had split a bottle of his wine.
He was acting younger than his age and as free as the companion.
“Ready, Giles?”
Showing no concern about the companion, Lilith had spoken in that cool tone of unconscious but absolute command that told me she was far more than nurse or playmate.
Giles Habibula lurched to his feet, almost upsetting the startled redhead.
Suddenly he was sober.
His awed respect assured me that Lilith’s unknown role in this affair was something more than to prove his recovered youth.
“For sweet life’s sake!” he wheezed.
“Don’t shock me so.”
“Come along, Giles.
Captain Ulnar is going to show us over the station.”
With a sad glance at the wine left in the bottle, he gave it to Gina and came puffing after us.
“Lil’s precious serum!”
His flat, bright, rock-colored eyes squinted at me craftily.
“It’s giving back my youth, but at a fearful cost.
Gnawing hunger and desperate thirst—and a yen I haven’t felt for fifty mortal years!”
I showed them Nowhere Near.
The station was a lean doughnut of inflated plastic and steel, just thick enough for rooms on both sides of a two-level corridor.
It ringed a thousand-foot hall of interstellar ice—frozen water and methane and ammonia—that would have been a comet if it had ever drifted close enough to a star.