CHAPTER -1

I

Norden could feel dread knot his mind as he watched the tiny blue speck against the black sky. It was a senseless, unnatural emotion, and he knew it. The searing blue point of flame could only mean that the approaching ship was powered by atomic rockets—and the Aliens drove their ships in some mysterious manner, without any kind of reaction motor. The object coming down toward the tiny asteroid could only be of terrestrial origin, powered by a human device.

Yet his fear grew worse. He shook his head, wondering again how close to insanity he had drifted. His eyes darted sideways, scanning the wreckage that had been his laboratory, then back to the descending ship. Mercifully, he couldn't remember most of what had happened. He only knew that it had been sufficiently bad to drive any human close to the brink of madness. It would have been torturing enough to be left alone for days in a wrecked and airless dome while the oxygen tanks were used up, one by one. But to have seen Hardwick's face when the Aliens caught him....

He tried to stop thinking about it. The Aliens were only vague shadows in his mind now—the picture of what must have happened as remote and unreal as his memories of struggling free from the wreckage.

Somehow, he'd survived against incredible odds, undetected by the Aliens. He'd dug out the emergency transmitter and tried signaling for help. Now apparently, before the last tank of oxygen on his back had been used up completely, rescue had come. He should have been ecstatic with relief.

The fear remained, some twisted reaction left over from the days of terror and hopelessness. He lifted his hands and studied them. They were steady enough; the fear was having no outward effect.

Already the ship was close enough for Norden to see glints of weak sunlight reflecting from its metal hull. The pilot must have been one of the best, for there was no wavering, or side-jetting to correct the course. It was coming straight down, slowing to a drift. As Norden stared the exhaust hit the jagged surface of the asteroid and splashed out. Abruptly it cut off, and the ship dropped slowly the few remaining feet, to come to rest less than half a mile away.

Norden knew he should start running toward it, and stood up. But he couldn't give the order to his legs. He stared toward the ship, then back at the ruins. Maybe there was something he should take with him. He had air enough for another hour. Surely there was no need to rush things. Men would be coming here for him. And it wouldn't do any harm to put off meeting them a little longer. He didn't want to be subjected to their questions yet.

He started hesitantly toward the ship, trying to force himself to move. Men began to emerge and head toward him. He dropped onto a mess that had been a super-speed tape instrument recorder and waited.

His mind was running a rat-race inside his head, and there was a gnawing tension. He cleared his throat and reached for the switch on his suit radio. The men were almost up to him. He got to his feet again, fumbling frantically with the little switch.

Then the harsh beam of a flashlight picked him out, and a gruff voice sounded in his headphones. "Dr. William Norden?"

He nodded, and rehearsed words stumbled to his lips. "Thank God, you got here! I was afraid the transmitter wouldn't work!"

There was a hint of something like kindness in the voice. "Take it easy, Dr. Norden! It did work, and we're here. What happened to Hardwick? Where is he?"

"Dead, I hope," Norden answered. "The Aliens got him!" He shuddered, glancing at the spot where it had happened.

The man wearing general's insignia nodded, while sickness spread over his face. He motioned to one of the others. "Get pics of the wreck, and collect any records you can. The rest of you give Dr. Norden a hand. And hurry! They may have spotted us already!"

The man with the camera went resolutely to work, flashing his shots with a strobe light that blinked twenty-four times a second. Two others began unrolling a stretcher.

Norden shook his head in feeble protest. "I can walk. And I've already collected Hardwick's notebooks."

They set a pace closer to a run than a walk, bouncing ludicrously in the slight gravity of the asteroid. Norden kept up with them easily enough, trying to make sense of his reactions. Most of the fear and tension had left him, as if he'd passed over some hurdles, and was experiencing a resurge of confidence. The military efficiency of his rescuers had also a bracing effect. Maybe he hadn't believed in his rescue until now. But he did feel better, though his eyes went on studying the others cautiously, as if looking for any reaction that might inadvertently betray them.

They reached the ship, and began pulling themselves through its flexible hatch. The leader jerked off his helmet and suit, exposing iron grey hair that contrasted rather startlingly with an almost youthful face. It was the face of a man who hadn't let himself grow soft during the years before the Aliens came. He swung toward Norden.

"How much gravity can you take, Dr. Norden?" he asked. "Six g's?"

"In a hammock, for a few minutes," Norden answered.

They were already heading up the ladder toward the nose of the ship. The general ripped a sling out of its case when they reached the control cabin. He snapped it to its lugs, motioned Norden onto it, and bound him in place in less time than he could have ordered the job done. Then he dropped to his own control seat. "Six g's for five minutes, then hold her at four until I order. Up ship!"

Norden didn't black out during the first five minutes, though the pressure was enough to drive the sling to its bottom mark and make its cables groan in protest. As they switched from six to four gravities, the pressure eased a little.

An hour crept by, and another. When the general finally ordered the drive cut, Norden estimated that they had been under acceleration for nearly five hours and were doing about two million miles an hour. Either the general was crazy, or the ship must have been stocked to the last bin with fuel. They were making more than five times the normal emergency speed.

Then the leader came back and began releasing Norden. "Sorry to give you such a beating after what you've been through, Dr. Norden," he said. "But we'll still be lucky if we have enough speed to slip past their detectors before they can trace our orbit and overhaul us. They've been getting worse lately."

He sighed, and his lips thinned. Then he shrugged. "We'll talk about that later. Right now you need food." He managed a smile. "I don't have to tell you that the doctor and psychiatrist will be biting their nails to give you the works. Oh, I'm Armsworth."

Norden felt the chill touch his mind again. He'd expected a doctor, and had been bracing himself for one. But the psychiatrist.... He forced calmness into his voice. "I could eat a horse!"

"You probably will," Armsworth told him with quick, automatic humor. "This is the Space Service!"

The little cabin to which Armsworth took him was crowded alarmingly. There were the two men waiting for him, with their specialized equipment. In addition, there was the forbidding bulk of a large recording machine ready to take down every word he uttered. He acknowledged the introductions, and downed a glass of some over-sweetened fruit juice which the doctor held out.

"It will get you ready for some real food," the physician told him. "Would you like to clean up while I look you over, before the main course comes?"

Norden seized on the chance. It would give him something to do beside tormenting himself, and it was obvious he needed grooming. His dark hair was matted, his face marked with dirt that had sunk into every wrinkle and line, and there was a thick growth of stubble on his skin. It was a thin, fairly good-looking face, as unfamiliar as if he'd just seen it for the first time in a photograph. He seemed to have forgotten himself, even.

While he washed and shaved, the doctor was busy. But the examination was less detailed than he had expected it would be, and finally the man stood back, nodding.

"For someone nearing forty, you're in excellent shape, Dr. Norden," he said. "You had a rough time of it, but I was sure you'd be all right physically when I heard you hadn't blacked out under high acceleration. Okay, go ahead and eat."

He moved toward the door, but showed no sign of leaving until his curiosity could be satisfied.

Norden had to force himself to eat, for he had no apparent appetite. The psychiatrist leaned forward casually, watching him. "Would you like to tell us about it, Dr. Norden?" he asked. "Precisely what happened to Hardwick?"

Norden shook his head, while the tension mounted again. The man would be on the alert for hidden meanings in his words, and he wasn't quite ready for that. Yet he was afraid to risk putting it off. "I'm not sure I can tell much. I—well, everything's pretty foggy. A lot of it I can't remember at all."

"Partial amnesia is fairly common," the psychiatrist said reassuringly. "In fact, everyone has touches of it. Try going back a bit—say to your childhood—to give you a running start. We've got plenty of time."

Norden had little interest in his childhood, and he skimmed over it with a few words. He'd done nothing unusual until he'd drifted into the new investigation of radiation outside the electromagnetic spectrum in his post-graduate college work. Then he'd suddenly developed, caught fire, and become something of a genius.

He was the first man ever to prove there was more than theory involved. He'd been called to Mars for the Widmark Interplanetary Award for his brilliant demonstration of protogravity after he'd floated two ounces of lead with a hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment that used twenty kilowatts of power.

In fifteen years at Mars Institute, he'd discovered four new types of extraspectral radiation, become a full professor, and had almost discovered how to harness nuclear binding energy.

Then the Aliens had come. They had appeared abruptly near Pluto, apparently coming at a speed greater than that of light, in strange globular ships that defied radar detection. Without provocation or mercy, they had sought out and destroyed every settlement between Pluto and Saturn, and had begun moving inward, systematically destroying all life in their path.

Nobody had ever seen an Alien—they invariably exploded to dust before they could be captured—but the horror of their senseless brutality was revealed in the hideous human corpses they left behind them.

Norden had been drafted while there was still optimism. Men could build a hundred ships to the Aliens' one, equally radar-proof, free from danger of magnetic or electronic detection, and nearly invisible in space. In anything like an even battle, men were certain to win. But they soon discovered it wasn't an even battle.

The Aliens had some means of detecting human ships accurately at distances of millions of miles, and blasting them with self-guided torpedoes, while remaining undetected themselves. And behind the torpedoes would come the dark globular ships to spray the wreckage with some force that left every cell utterly lifeless.

Hardwick had been a quasi-scientist, mixed up with certain weird cults, who maintained a private laboratory on an asteroid near Jupiter's orbit. And in the desperation that followed the first foolish optimism, his theory that the Aliens could detect life itself, or the presence of the questionable mitogenetic rays that were supposed to radiate from nerve endings, was actually taken seriously.

Surprisingly, the tests indicated that remote-controlled ships which had been completely sterilized went undetected, while ships carrying rats or other life were blasted. Norden, as the expert on all strange radiation, had been sent to work with Hardwick in attempting to devise a screen for the hypothetical life radiation.

He never learned whether Hardwick was a wild genius, or an even wilder lunatic. While he was wearing Hardwick's improvised shield during one of the attempts to test it, the Aliens had landed and broken in.

"What did they look like?" the psychologist asked casually—too casually, Norden felt.

"Well, they—" He frowned, trying to remember, but a clamp came down over his mind. "I—I can't remember. And they did—something—to Hardwick. I—I...."

Armsworth brushed the other question aside. "Never mind. You were wearing Hardwick's shield. Didn't they notice you?"

Norden shook his head doubtfully. "No, I don't think they did. It's all horribly blurred. I think I jumped for the spacesuit locker when they breeched the airlock on the dome. I must have gotten into a suit, and been hidden by the locker door. And I must have run out after they took Hardwick away."

At least he hadn't been hurt when the Alien bomb ruined the dome. He'd dug out the transmitter, sent the message, and then had spent the agony of waiting in trying to decipher the cryptic code in Hardwick's notebooks.

They went over his account several times, but he could tell then little more. Then there were tests, some of which he could understand and answer without trouble, while others left him taut with uncertainty and etched worried lines into the face of the psychiatrist. But at last the man nodded doubtfully.

"I think he'll do," he reported hesitantly to Armsworth. "A traumatic experience always leaves scars, but...."

"But or no he'd better do," Armsworth said gruffly. "No wonder they ordered us out to pick him up! He was within fifty feet of the Aliens, and they didn't locate him! Dr. Norden, if that shield works and you can duplicate it, you'll be the most valuable man alive!"

"And the tiredest and sleepiest," Norden suggested. His eyes narrowed, and his mind darted about, seeking some sign of the wrong reaction. Then he relaxed as the doctor and psychiatrist picked up their equipment and went out with advice he hardly heard. Armsworth lingered, and Norden searched about in his mind for what seemed to be a safe question.

"How long until we reach Mars, general?" he asked.

"We don't!" Armstrong's voice was suddenly thick and bitter. "We've abandoned Mars. The Aliens have moved inward. We—oh, hell, we'll reach our new laboratory on the Moon base in about four days! And you'd better start praying that shield works, or my value to you won't be worth salvaging."

He shrugged abruptly and left, closing the cabin door quietly behind him. Norden slumped down on the bed, not bothering to remove his clothes.

Automatically, he lifted his arms until both his hands were pressing against the nape of his neck, settled into a comfortable position against the automatic straps, and began reviewing all the events of his rescue carefully. And bit by bit, the worry in his head quieted. He'd gotten away with it. What "it" was, he didn't know or even remotely suspect, but the horrible tension was gone.