Stranger Station

by Damon Knight

The clang of metal echoed hollowly down through the Station’s many vaulted corridors and rooms. Paul Wesson stood listening for a moment as the rolling echoes died away. The maintenance rocket was gone, heading back to Home; they had left him alone in Stranger Station.

Stranger Station! The name itself quickened his imagination. Wesson knew that both orbital stations had been named a century ago by the then-British administration of the satellite service; “Home” because the larger, inner station handled the traffic of Earth and its colonies; “Stranger” because the outer station was designed specifically for dealings with foreigners—beings from outside the solar system. But even that could not diminish the wonder of Stranger Station, whirling out here alone in the dark—waiting for its once-in-two-decades visitor…

One man, out of all Sol’s billions, had the task and privilege of enduring the alien’s presence when it came. The two races, according to Wesson’s understanding of the subject, were so fundamentally different that it was painful for them to meet. Well, he had volunteered for the job, and he thought he could handle it—the rewards were big enough.

He had gone through all the tests, and against his own expectations he had been chosen. The maintenance crew had brought him up as dead weight, drugged in a survival hamper; they had kept him the same way while they did their work and then had brought him back to consciousness. Now they were gone. He was alone.

But not quite.

“Welcome to Stranger Station, Sergeant Wesson,” said a pleasant voice. “This is your alpha network speaking. I’m here to protect and serve you in every way. If there’s anything you want, just ask me.” It was a neutral voice, with a kind of professional friendliness in it, like that of a good schoolteacher or rec supervisor.

Wesson had been warned, but he was still shocked at the human quality of it. The alpha networks were-the last word in robot brains—computers, safety devices, personal servants, libraries, all wrapped up in one, with something so close to “personality” and “free will” that experts were still arguing the question. They were rare and fantastically expensive; Wesson had never met one before.

“Thanks,” he said now, to the empty air. “Uh—what do I call you, by the way? I can’t keep saying, ‘Hey, alpha network.’ ”

“One of your recent predecessors called me Aunt Nettie,” was the response.

Wesson grimaced. Alpha network—Aunt Nettie. He hated puns; that wouldn’t do. “The aunt part is all right,” he said. “Suppose I call you Aunt Jane. That was my mother’s sister; you sound like her, a little bit.”

“I am honored,” said the invisible mechanism politely. “Can I serve you any refreshments now? Sandwiches? A drink?”

“Not just yet,” said Wesson. “I think I’ll look the place over first.”

He turned away. That seemed to end the conversation as far as the network was concerned. A good thing; it was all right to have it for company, speaking when spoken to, but if it got talkative…

The human part of the Station was in four segments: bedroom, living room, dining room, bath. The living room was comfortably large and pleasantly furnished in greens and tans; the only mechanical note in it was the big instrument console in one corner. The other rooms, arranged in a ring around the living room, were tiny; just space enough for Wesson, a narrow encircling corridor, and the mechanisms that would serve him. The whole place was spotlessly clean, gleaming and efficient in spite of its twenty-year layoff.

This is the gravy part of the run, Wesson told himself. The month before the alien came—good food, no work, and an alpha network for conversation. “Aunt Jane, I’ll have a small steak now,” he said to the network. “Medium rare, with hashed brown potatoes, onions and mushrooms, and a glass of lager. Call me when it’s ready.”

“Right,” said the voice pleasantly. Out in the dining room, the autochef began to hum and cluck self-importantly. Wesson wandered over and inspected the instrument console. Air locks were sealed and tight, said the dials; the air was cycling. The station was in orbit and rotating on its axis with a force at the perimeter, where Wesson was, of one g. The internal temperature of this part of the Station was an even 73°.

The other side of the board told a different story; all the dials were dark and dead. Sector Two, occupying a volume some eighty-eight thousand tunes as great as this one, was not yet functioning.

Wesson had a vivid mental image of the Station, from photographs and diagrams—a five-hundred-foot Duralumin sphere, onto which the shallow thirty-foot disk of the human section had been stuck apparently as an afterthought. The whole cavity of the sphere, very nearly—except for a honeycomb of supply and maintenance rooms and the all-important, recently enlarged vats—was one cramped chamber for the alien…

“Steak’s ready!” said Aunt Jane.

The steak was good, bubbling crisp outside the way he liked it, tender and pink inside. “Aunt Jane,” he said with his mouth full, “this is pretty soft, isn’t it?”

“The steak?” asked the voice, with a family anxious note.

Wesson grinned. “Never mind,” he said. “Listen, Aunt Jane, you’ve been through this routine—how many times? Were you installed with the Station, or what?”

“I was not installed with the Station,” said Aunt Jane primly. “I have assisted at three contacts.”

“Um. Cigarette,” said Wesson, slapping his pockets. The autochef hummed for a moment, and popped a pack of G. I.’s out of a vent. Wesson lighted up. “All right,” he said, “you’ve been through this three times. There are a lot of things you can tell me, right?”

“Oh, yes, certainly. What would you like to know?”

Wesson smoked, leaning back reflectively, green eyes narrowed. “First,” he said, “read me the Pigeon report—you know, from the Brief History. I want to see if I remember it right.”

“Chapter Two,” said the voice promptly. “First contact with a non-Solar intelligence was made by Commander Ralph C. Pigeon on July 1, 1987, during an emergency landing on Titan. The following is an excerpt from his official report:

“ ‘While searching for a possible cause for our mental disturbance, we discovered what appeared to be a gigantic construction of metal on the far side of the ridge. Our distress grew stronger with the approach to this construction, which was polyhedral and approximately five times the length of the Cologne.

“ ‘Some of those present expressed a wish to retire, but Lt. Acuff and myself had a strong sense of being called or summoned in some indefinable way. Although our uneasiness was not lessened, we therefore agreed to go forward and keep radio contact with the rest of the party while they returned to the ship.

“ ‘We gained access to the alien construction by way of a large, irregular opening… The internal temperature was minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit; the atmosphere appeared to consist of methane and ammonia… Inside the second chamber, an alien creature was waiting for us. We felt the distress, which I have tried to describe, to a much greater degree than before, and also the sense of summoning or pleading… We observed that the creature was exuding a thick yellowish fluid from certain joints or pores in its surface. Though disgusted, I managed to collect a sample of this exudate, and it was later forwarded for analysis…’

“The second contact was made ten years later by Commodore Crawford’s famous Titan Expedition—”

“No, that’s enough,” said Wesson. “I just wanted the Pigeon quote.” He smoked, brooding. “It seems kind of chopped off, doesn’t it? Have you got a longer version in your memory banks anywhere?”

There was a pause. “No,” said Aunt Jane.

’There was more -to it when I was a kid,” Wesson complained nervously. “I read that book when I was twelve, and I remember a long description of the alien—that is, I remember its being there.” He swung around. “Listen, Aunt Jane—you’re a sort of universal watchdog, that right? You’ve got cameras and mikes all over the Station?”

“Yes,” said the network, sounding—was it Wesson’s imagination?—faintly injured.

“Well, what about Sector Two? You must have cameras up there, too, isn’t that so?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then you can tell me. What do the aliens look like?”

There was a definite pause. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that,” said Aunt Jane.

“No,” said Wesson, “I didn’t think you could. You’ve got orders not to, I guess, for the same reason those history books have been cut since I was a kid. Now, what would the reason be? Have you got any idea, Aunt Jane?”

There was another pause. “Yes,” the voice admitted.

“Well?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t—”

“—tell you that,” Wesson repeated along with it. “All right. At least we know where we stand.”

“Yes, Sergeant. Would you like some dessert?”

“No dessert. One other thing. What happens to Station watchmen, like me, after their tour of duty?”

“They are upgraded to Class Seven, students with unlimited leisure, and receive outright gifts of seven thousand stellors, plus free Class One housing…”

“Yeah, I know all that,” said Wesson, licking his dry lips. “But here’s what I’m asking you. The ones you know—what kind of shape were they in when they left here?”

“The usual human shape,” said the voice brightly. “Why do you ask, Sergeant?”

Wesson made a discontented gesture. “Something I remember from a bull session at the Academy. I can’t get it out of my head; I know it had something to do with the Station. Just a part of a sentence: ‘…blind as a bat and white bristles all over…’ Now, would that be a description of the alien—or the watchman when they came to take him away?”

Aunt Jane went into one of her heavy pauses. “All right, I’ll save you the trouble,” said Wesson. “You’re sorry, you can’t tell me that.”

“I am sorry,” said the robot sincerely.

As the slow days passed into weeks, Wesson grew aware of the Station almost as a living thing. He could feel its resilient metal ribs enclosing him, lightly bearing his weight with its own as it swung. He could feel the waiting emptiness “up there,” and he sensed the alert electronic network that spread around him everywhere, watching and probing, trying to anticipate his needs.

Aunt Jane was a model companion. She had a record library of thousands of hours of music; she had films to show him, and microprinted books that he could read on the scanner in the living room; or if he preferred, she would read to him. She controlled the Station’s three telescopes, and on request would give him a view of Earth or the Moon or Home…

But there was no news. Aunt Jane would obligingly turn on the radio receiver if he asked her, but nothing except static came out. That was the thing that weighed most heavily on Wesson, as time passed—the knowledge that radio silence was being imposed on all ships in transit, on the orbital stations, and on the planet-to-space transmitters. It was an enormous, almost a crippling handicap. Some information could be transmitted over relatively short distances by photophone, but ordinarily the whole complex traffic of the space lanes depended on radio.

But this coming alien contact was so delicate a thing that even a radio voice, out here where the Earth was only a tiny disk twice the size of the Moon, might upset it. It was so precarious a thing, Wesson thought, that only one man could be allowed in the Station while the alien was there, and to give that man the company that would keep him sane, they had to install an alpha network…

“Aunt Jane?”

The voice answered promptly, “Yes, Paul.”

“This distress that the books talk about—you wouldn’t know what it is, would you?”

“No, Paul.”

“Because robot brains don’t feel it, right?”

“Right, Paul.”

“So tell me this—why do they need a man here at all? Why can’t they get along with just you?”

A pause. “I don’t know, Paul.” The voice sounded faintly wistful. Were those gradations of tone really in it, Wesson wondered, or was his imagination supplying them?

He got up from the living room couch and paced restlessly back and forth. “Let’s have a look at Earth,” he said. Obediently, the viewing screen on the console glowed into life: there was the blue Earth, swimming deep below him, in its first quarter, jewel bright. “Switch it off,” Wesson said.

“A little music?” suggested the voice, and immediately began to play something soothing, full of woodwinds.

“No,” said Wesson. The music stopped.

Wesson’s hands were trembling; he had a caged and frustrated feeling.

The fitted suit was in its locker beside the air lock. Wesson had been topside in it once or twice; there was nothing to see up there, just darkness and cold. But he had to get out of this squirrel cage. He took the suit down and began to get into it.

“Paul,” said Aunt Jane anxiously, “are you feeling nervous?”

“Yes,” he snarled.

’Then don’t go into Sector Two,” said Aunt Jane.

“Don’t tell me what to do, you hunk of tin!” said Wesson with sudden anger. He zipped up the front of his suit with a vicious motion.

Aunt Jane was silent.

Seething, Wesson finished his check-off and opened the lock door.

The air lock, an upright tube barely large enough for one man, was the only passage between Sector One and Sector Two. It was also the only exit from Sector One; to get here in the first place, Wesson had had to enter the big lock at the “south” pole of the sphere, and travel all the way down inside, by drop hole and catwalk. He had been drugged unconscious at the time, of course. When the time came, he would go out the same way; neither the maintenance rocket nor the tanker had any space, or time, to spare.

At the “north” pole, opposite, there was a third air lock, this one so huge it could easily have held an interplanetary freighter. But that was nobody’s business—no human being’s.

In the beam of Wesson’s helmet lamp, the enormous central cavity of the Station was an inky gulf that sent back only remote, mocking glimmers of light. The near walls sparkled with hoarfrost. Sector Two was not yet pressurized; there was only a diffuse vapor that had leaked through the airseal and had long since frozen into the powdery deposit that lined the walls. The metal rang cold under his shod feet; the vast emptiness of the chamber was the more depressing because it-was airless, unwarmed and unlit. Alone, said his footsteps; alone…

He was thirty yards up the catwalk when his anxiety suddenly grew stronger. Wesson stopped in spite of himself and turned clumsily, putting his back to the wall. The support of the solid wall was not enough. The catwalk seemed threatening to tilt underfoot, dropping Mm into the lightless gulf.

Wesson recognized this drained feeling, this metallic taste at the back of his tongue. It was fear.

The thought ticked through his head: They want me to be afraid. But why? Why now? Of what?

Equally suddenly, he knew. The nameless pressure tightened, like a great fist closing, and Wesson had the appalling sense of something so huge that it had no limits at all, descending, with a terrible endless swift slowness…

It was time.

His first month was up.

The alien was coming.

As Wesson turned, gasping, the whole huge structure of the Station around him seemed to dwindle to the size of an ordinary room—and Wesson with it, so that he seemed to himself like a tiny insect, frantically scuttling down the walls toward safety.

Behind him as he ran, the Station boomed.

In the silent rooms, all the lights were burning dimly. Wesson lay still, looking at the ceiling. Up there his imagination formed a shifting, changing image of the alien—huge, shadowy, formlessly menacing.

Sweat had gathered in globules on his brow. He stared, unable to look away.

“That was why you didn’t want me to go topside, huh, Aunt Jane?” he said hoarsely.

“Yes. The nervousness is the first sign. But you gave me a direct order, Paul.”

“I know it,” he said vaguely, still staring fixedly at the ceiling. “A funny thing… Aunt Jane?”

“Yes, Paul?”

“You won’t tell me what it looks like, right?”

“No, Paul.”

“I don’t want to know. Ix›rd, I don’t want to know… Funny thing, Aunt Jane, part of me is just pure funk—I’m so scared I’m nothing but a jelly.”

“I know,” said the voice gently.

“—And part is real cool and calm, as if it didn’t matter. Crazy, the things you think about. You know?”

“What things, Paul?”

He tried to laugh. “I’m remembering a kids’ party I went to twenty, twenty-five years ago. I was—let’s see—I was nine. I remember, because that was the same year my father died.

“We were living in Dallas then, in a rented mobile house, and there was a family in the next tract with a bunch of redheaded kids. They were always throwing parties; nobody liked them much, but everybody always went.”

“Tell me about the party, Paul.”

He shifted on the couch. “This one—this one was a Halloween party. I remember the girls had on black and orange dresses, and the boys mostly wore spirit costumes. I was about the youngest kid there, and I felt kind of out of place. Then all of a sudden one of the redheads jumps up in a skull mask, hollering, ‘C’mon, everybody get ready for hide-and-seek.’ And he grabs me, and says, ‘You be it,’ and before I can even move, he shoves me into a dark closet. And I hear that door lock behind me.”

He moistened his lips. “And then—you know, in the darkness—I feel something hit my face. You know, cold and clammy, like—I don’t know—something dead…

“I just hunched up on the floor of that closet, waiting for that thing to touch me again. You know? That thing, cold and kind of gritty, hanging up there. You know what it was? A cloth glove, full of ice and bran cereal. A joke. Boy, that was one joke I never forgot… Aunt Jane?”

“Yes, Paul.”

“Hey, I’ll bet you alpha networks made great psychs, huh? I could lie here and tell you anything, because you’re just a machine—right?”

“Right, Paul,” said the network sorrowfully.

“Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane… It’s no use kidding myself along. I can feel that thing up there, just a couple of yards away.”

“I know you can, Paul.”

“I can’t stand it, Aunt Jane.”

“You can if you think you can, Paul.”

He writhed on the couch. “It’s—it’s dirty, it’s clammy. My God, is it going to be like that for five months? I can’t, it’ll kill me, Aunt Jane.!’

There was another thunderous boom, echoing down through the structural members of the Station. “What’s that?” Wesson gasped. “The other ship—casting off?”

“Yes. Now he’s alone, just as you are.”

“Not like me. He can’t be feeling what I’m feeling. Aunt Jane, you don’t know…”

Up there, separated from him only by a few yards of metal, the alien’s enormous, monstrous body hung. It was that poised weight, as real as if he could touch it, that weighed down his chest.

Wesson had been a space dweller for most of his adult life and knew even in his bones that, if an orbital station ever collapsed, the “under” part would not be crushed but would be hurled away by its own angular momentum. This was not the oppressiveness of planetside buildings, where the looming mass above you seemed always threatening to fall. This was something else, completely distinct, and impossible to argue away.

It was the scent of danger, hanging unseen up there in the dark, waiting, cold and heavy. It was the recurrent nightmare of Wesson’s childhood—the bloated unreal shape, no-color, no-size, that kept on hideously falling toward his face… It was the dead puppy he had pulled out of the creek, that summer in Dakota—wet fur, limp head, cold, cold, cold…

With an effort, Wesson rolled over on the couch and lifted himself to one elbow. The pressure was an insistent chill weight on his skull; the room seemed to dip and swing around him in slow, dizzy circles.

Wesson felt his jaw muscles contorting with the strain as he knelt, then stood erect. His back and legs tightened; his mouth hung painfully open. He took one step, then another, timing them to hit the floor as it came upright.

The right side of the console, the one that had been dark, was lighted. Pressure in Sector Two, according to the indicator, was about one and a third atmospheres. The air-lock indicator showed a slightly higher pressure of oxygen and argon; that was to keep any of the alien atmosphere from contaminating Sector One, but it also meant that the lock would no longer open from either side. Wesson found that irrationally comforting.

“Lemme see Earth,” he gasped.

The screen lighted up as he stared into it. “It’s a long way down,” he said. A long, long way down to the bottom of that well… He had spent ten featureless years as a servo tech in Home Station. Before that, he’d wanted to be a pilot, but had washed out the first year—couldn’t take the math. But he had never once thought of going back to Earth.

Now, suddenly, after all these years, that tiny blue disk seemed infinitely desirable.

“Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane, it’s beautiful,” he mumbled.

Down there, he knew, it was spring; and in certain places, where the edge of darkness retreated, it was morning—a watery blue morning like the sea light caught in an agate, a morning with smoke and mist in it, a morning of stillness and promise. Down there, lost years and miles away, some tiny dot of a woman was opening her microscopic door to listen to an atom’s song. Lost, lost, and packed away in cotton wool, like a specimen slide—one spring morning on Earth.

Black miles above, so far that sixty Earths could have been piled one on another to make a pole for his perch, Wesson swung in his endless circle within a circle. Yet, vast as the gulf beneath him was, all this—Earth, Moon, orbital stations, ships; yes, the Sun and all the rest of his planets, too—was the merest sniff of space, to be pinched up between thumb and finger.

Beyond—there was the true gulf. In that deep night, galaxies lay sprawled aglitter, piercing a distance that could only be named in a meaningless number, a cry of dismay: O… O… O…

Crawling and fighting, blasting with energies too big for them, men had come as far as Jupiter. But if a man had been tall enough to lie with his boots toasting in the Sun and his head freezing at Pluto, still he would have been too small for that overwhelming emptiness. Here, not at Pluto, was the outermost limit of man’s empire; here the Outside tunneled down to meet it, like the pinched waist of an hourglass; here, and only here, the two worlds came near enough to touch. Ours—and Theirs.

Down at the bottom of the board, now, the golden dials were faintly alight, the needles trembling ever so little on their pins.

Deep in the vats, the vats, the golden liquid was trickling down: “Though disgusted, I took a sample of the exudate, and it was forwarded for analysis…”

Space-cold fluid, trickling down the bitter walls of the tubes, forming little pools in the cups of darkness; goldenly agleam there, half alive. The golden elixir. One drop of the concentrate would arrest aging for twenty years—keep your arteries soft, tonus good, eyes clear, hair pigmented, brain alert.

That was what the tests of Pigeon’s sample had showed. That was the reason for the whole crazy history of the “alien trading post”—first a hut on Titan, then later, when people understood more about the problem, Stranger Station.

Once every twenty years, an alien would come down out of Somewhere, and sit in the tiny cage we had made for him, and make us rich beyond our dreams—rich with life—and still we did not know why.

Above him, Wesson imagined he could see that sensed body awallow in the glacial blackness, its bulk passively turning with the Station’s spin, bleeding a chill gold into the lips of the tubes—drip… drop…

Wesson held his head. The pressure inside made it hard to think; it felt as if his skull were about to fly apart. “Aunt Jane,” he said.

“Yes, Paul.” The kindly, comforting voice, like a nurse. The nurse who stands beside your cot while you have painful, necessary things done to you. Efficient, trained friendliness.

“Aunt Jane,” said Wesson, “do you know why they keep coming back?”

“No,” said the voice precisely. “It is a mystery.”

Wesson nodded. “I had,” he said, “an interview with Gower before I left Home. You know Gower? Chief of the Outer-world Bureau. Came up especially to see me.”

“Yes?” said Aunt Jane encouragingly.

“Said to me, Wesson, you got to find out. Find out if we can count on them to keep up the supply. You know? There’s fifty million more of us,’ he says,than when you were born. We need more of the stuff, and we got to know if we can count on it. Because,’ he says, ‘you know what would happen if it stopped?’ Do you know, Aunt Jane?”

“It would be,” said the voice, “a catastrophe.”

“That’s right,” Wesson said respectfully. “It would. Like, he says to me, What if the people in the Nefud area were cut off from the Jordan Valley Authority? Why, there’d be millions dying of thirst in a week.

“ ‘Or what if the freighters stopped coming to Moon Base? Why,’ he says, ‘there’d be thousands starving and smothering to death.’

“He says, ‘Where the water is, where you can get food and air, people are going to settle and get married, you know? And have kids.

“He says, ‘If the so-called longevity serum stopped coming…’ Says, ‘Every twentieth adult in the Sol family is due for his shot this year.’ Says, ‘Of those, almost twenty percent are one hundred fifteen or older.’ Says, ‘The deaths in that group in the first year would be at least three times what the actuarial tables call for.’ ” Wesson raised a strained face.

“I’m thirty-four, you know?” he said. “That Gower, he made me feel like a baby.”

Aunt Jane made a sympathetic noise.

“Drip, drip,” said Wesson hysterically. The needles of the tall golden indicators were infinitesimally higher. “Every twenty years we need more of the stuff, so somebody like me has to come out and take it for five lousy months. And one of them has to come out and sit there, and drip. Why, Aunt Jane? What for? Why should it matter to them whether we live a long time or not? Why do they keep on coming back? What do they take away from here?”

But to these questions, Aunt Jane had no reply.

All day and every day, the lights burned cold and steady in the circular gray corridor around the rim of Sector One. The hard gray flooring had been deeply scuffed in that circular path before Wesson ever walked there—the corridor existed for that only, like a treadmill in a squirrel cage. It said “Walk,” and Wesson walked. A man would go crazy if he sat still, with that squirming, indescribable pressure on his head; and so Wesson paced off the miles, all day and every day, until he dropped like a dead man in the bed at night.

He talked, too, sometimes to himself, sometimes to the listening alpha network; sometimes it was difficult to tell which. “Moss on a rock,” he muttered, pacing. “Told him, wouldn’t give twenty mills for any shell… Little pebbles down there, all colors.” He shuffled on in silence for a while. Abruptly: “I don’t see why they couldn’t have given me a cat.”

Aunt Jane said nothing. After a moment Wesson went on, “Nearly everybody at Home has a cat, for God’s sake, or a goldfish or something. You’re all right, Aunt Jane, but I can’t see you. My God, I mean if they couldn’t send a man a woman for company—what I mean, my God, I never liked cats.” He swung around the doorway into the bedroom, and absentmindedly slammed his fist into the bloody place on the wall.

“But a cat would have been something,” he said.

Aunt Jane was still silent.

“Don’t pretend your feelings are hurt. I know you, you’re only a machine,” said Wesson. “Listen, Aunt Jane, I remember a cereal package one time that had a horse and a cowboy on the side. There wasn’t much room, so about all you saw was their faces. It used to strike me funny how much they looked alike. Two ears on the top with hair in the middle. Two eyes. Nose. Mouth with teeth in it. I was thinking, we’re kind of distant cousins, aren’t we, us and the horses. But compared to that thing up there—we’re brothers. You know?”

“Yes,” said Aunt Jane quietly.

“So I keep asking myself, why couldn’t they have sent a horse or a cat instead of a man? But I guess the answer is because only a man could take what I’m taking. God, only a man. Right?”

“Right,” said Aunt Jane with deep sorrow.

Wesson stopped at the bedroom doorway again and shuddered, holding onto the frame. “Aunt Jane,” he said in a low, clear voice, “you take pictures of him up there, don’t you?”

“Yes, Paul.”

“And you take pictures of me. And then what happens? After it’s all over, who looks at the pictures?”

“I don’t know,” said Aunt Jane humbly.

“You don’t know. But whoever looks at ’em, it doesn’t do any good. Right? We got to find out why, why, why… And we never do find out, do we?”

“No,” said Aunt Jane.

“But don’t they figure that if the man who’s going through it could see him, he might be able to tell something? That other people couldn’t? Doesn’t that make sense?”

“That’s out of my hands, Paul.”

He sniggered. “That’s funny. Oh, that’s funny.” He chortled in his throat, reeling around the circuit.

“Yes, that’s funny,” said Aunt Jane.

“Aunt Jane, tell me what happens to the watchmen.”

“I can’t tell you that, Paul.”

He lurched into the living room, sat down before the console, beat on its smooth, cold metal with his fists. “What are you, some kind of monster? Isn’t there any blood in your veins, or oil or anything?”

“Please, Paul—”

“Don’t you see, all I want to know, can they talk? Can they tell anything after their tour is over?”

“No, Paul.”

He stood upright, clutching the console for balance. “They can’t? No, I figured. And you know why?”

“No.”

“Up there,” said Wesson obscurely. “Moss on the rock.”

“Paul, what?”

“We get changed,” said Wesson, stumbling out of the room again. “We get changed. Like a piece of iron next to a magnet. Can’t help it. You—nonmagnetic, I guess. Goes right through you, huh, Aunt Jane? You don’t get changed. You stay here, wait for the next one.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Jane.

“You know,” said Wesson, pacing, “I can tell how he’s lying up there. Head that way, tail the other. Am I right?”

“Yes,” said Aunt Jane.

Wesson stopped. “Yes,” he said intently. “So you can tell me what you see up there, can’t you, Aunt Jane?”

“No. Yes. It isn’t allowed.”

“Listen, Aunt Jane, we’ll die unless we can find out what makes those aliens tick! Remember that.”

Wesson leaned against the corridor wall, gazing up. “He’s turning now—around this way. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what else is he doing? Come on, Aunt Jane, tell me!”

A pause. “He is twitching his—”

“What?”

“I don’t know the words.”

“My God, my God,” said Wesson, clutching his head, “of course there aren’t any words.” He ran into the living room, clutched the console, and stared at the blank screen. He pounded the metal with his fist. “You’ve got to show me, Aunt Jane, come on and show me—show me!”

“It isn’t allowed,” Aunt Jane protested.

“You’ve got to do it just the same, or we’ll die, Aunt Jane—millions of us, billions, and it’ll be your fault, get it? Your fault, Aunt Jane!”

“Please,” said the voice. There was a pause. The screen flickered to life, for an instant only. Wesson had a glimpse of something massive and dark, but half transparent, like a magnified insect—a tangle of nameless limbs, whiplike filaments, claws, wings…

He clutched the edge of the console.

“Was that all right?” Aunt Jane asked.

“Of course! What do you think, it’ll kill me to look at it? Put it back, Aunt Jane, put it back!”

Reluctantly, the screen lighted again. Wesson stared and went on staring. He mumbled something.

“What?” said Aunt Jane.

“Life of my love, I loathe thee,” said Wesson, staring. He roused himself after a moment and turned away. The image of the alien stayed with him as he went reeling into the corridor again; he was not surprised to find that it reminded him of all the loathsome, crawling, creeping things the Earth was full of. That explained why he was not supposed to see the alien, or even know what it looked like—because that fed his hate. And it was all right for him to be afraid of the alien, but he was not supposed to hate it… Why not? Why not?

His fingers were shaking. He felt drained, steamed, dried up and withered. The one daily shower Aunt Jane allowed him was no longer enough. Twenty minutes after bathing the acid sweat dripped again from his armpits, the cold sweat was beaded on his forehead, the hot sweat was in his palms. Wesson felt as if there were a furnace inside him, out of control, all the dampers drawn. He knew that, under stress, something of the kind did happen to a man; the body’s chemistry was altered—more adrenalin, more glycogen in the muscles, eyes brighter, digestion retarded. That was the trouble—he was burning himself up, unable to fight the thing that tormented him, nor run from it.

After another circuit, Wesson’s steps faltered. He hesitated, and went into the living room. He leaned over the console, staring. From the screen, the alien stared blindly up into space. Down in the dark side, the golden indicators had climbed: the vats were more than two thirds filled.

To fight or run …

Slowly Wesson sank down in front of the console. He sat hunched, head bent, hands squeezed tight between his knees, trying to hold onto the thought that had come to him.

If the alien felt a pain as great as Wesson’s—or greater—

Stress might alter the alien’s body chemistry, too.

Life of my love, I loathe thee.

Wesson pushed the Irrelevant thought aside. He stared at the screen, trying to envisage the alien up there, wincing in pain and distress—sweating a golden sweat of horror…

After a long time, he stood up and walked into the kitchen. He caught the table edge to keep his legs from carrying him on around the circuit. He sat down.

Humming fondly, the autochef slid out a tray of small glasses—water, orange juice, milk. Wesson put the water glass to his stiff lips; the water was cool and hurt his throat. Then the juice, but he could drink only a little of it; then he sipped the milk. Aunt Jane hummed approvingly.

Dehydrated. How long had it been since he had eaten or drunk? He looked at his hands. They were thin bundles of sticks, ropy-veined, with hard yellow claws. He could see the bones of his forearms under the skin, and his heart’s beating stirred the cloth at his chest. The pale hairs on his arms and thighs—were they blond or white?

The blurred reflections in the metal trim of the dining room gave him no answers—only pale faceless smears of gray. Wesson felt light-headed and very weak, as if he had just ended a bout of fever. He fumbled over his ribs and shoulder bones. He was thin.

He sat in front of the autochef for a few minutes more, but no food came out. Evidently Aunt Jane did not think he was ready for it, and perhaps she was right. Worse for them than for us, he thought dizzily. That’s why the Station’s so far out, why radio silence, and only one man aboard. They couldn’t stand it at all, otherwise … Suddenly he could think of nothing but sleep—the bottomless pit, layer after layer of smothering velvet, numbing and soft… His leg muscles quivered and twitched when he tried to walk, but he managed to get to the bedroom and fall on the mattress. The resilient block seemed to dissolve under him. His bones were melting.

He woke with a clear head, very weak, thinking cold and clear: When two alien cultures meet, the stronger must transform the weaker with love or hate. “Wesson’s Law,” he said aloud. He looked automatically for pencil and paper, but there was none, and he realized he would have to tell Aunt Jane, and let her remember it.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Never mind, remember it anyway. You’re good at that, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Paul.”

“All right—I want some breakfast.”

He thought about Aunt Jane, so nearly human, sitting up here in her metal prison, leading one man after another through the torments of hell—nursemaid, protector, torturer. They must have known that something would have to give… But the alphas were comparatively new; nobody understood them very well. Perhaps they really thought that an absolute prohibition could never be broken.

… the stronger must transform the weaker…

I’m the stronger, he thought. And that’s the way it’s going to be. He stopped at the console, and the screen was blank. He said angrily, “Aunt Jane!” And with a guilty start, the screen flickered into life.

Up there, the alien had rolled again in his pain. Now the great clustered eyes were staring directly into the camera; the coiled limbs threshed in pain; the eyes were staring, asking, pleading…

“No,” said Wesson, feeling his own pain like an iron cap, and he slammed his hand down on the manual control. The screen went dark. He looked up, sweating, and saw the floral picture over the console.

The thick stems were like antennae, the leaves thoraxes, the buds like blind insect eyes. The whole picture moved slightly, endlessly, in a slow waiting rhythm.

Wesson clutched the hard metal of the console and stared at the picture, with sweat cold on his brow, until it turned into a calm, meaningless arrangement of lines again. Then he went into the dining room, shaking, and sat down.

After a moment he said, “Aunt Jane, does it get worse?”

“No. From now on, it gets better.”

“How long?” he asked vaguely.

“One month.”

A month, getting “better”—that was the way it had always been, with the watchman swamped and drowned, his personality submerged. Wesson thought about the men who had gone before him—Class Seven citizenship, with unlimited leisure, and Class One housing. Yes, sure—in a sanatorium.

His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his fists clenched hard. Not me! he thought.

He spread his hands on the cool metal to steady them. He said, “How much longer do they usually stay able to talk?”

“You are already talking longer than any of them…”

Then there was a blank. Wesson was vaguely aware, in snatches, of the corridor walls moving past and the console glimpsed and of a thunderous cloud of ideas that swirled around his head in a beating of wings. The aliens—what did they want? And what happened to the watchmen in Stranger Station?

The haze receded a little, and he was in the dining room again, staring vacantly at the table. Something was wrong.

He ate a few spoonfuls of the gruel the autochef served him, then pushed it away; the stuff tasted faintly unpleasant. The machine hummed anxiously and thrust a poached egg at him, but Wesson got up from the table.

The Station was all but silent. The resting rhythm of the household machines throbbed in the walls, unheard. The blue-lighted living room was spread out before him like an empty stage setting, and Wesson stared as if he had never seen it before.

He lurched to the console and stared down at the pictured alien on the screen—heavy, heavy, asprawl with pain in the darkness. The needles of the golden indicators were high, the enlarged vats almost full. It’s too much for him, Wesson thought with grim satisfaction. The peace that followed the pain had not descended as it was supposed to; no, not this time!

He glanced up at the painting over the console—heavy crustacean limbs that swayed gracefully in the sea…

He shook his head violently. I won’t let it; I won’t give in! He held the back of one hand close to his eyes. He saw the dozens of tiny cuneiform wrinkles stamped into the skin over the knuckles, the pale hairs sprouting, the pink shiny flesh of recent scars. I’m human, he thought. But when he let his hand fall onto the console, the bony fingers seemed to crouch like crustaceans’ legs, ready to scuttle.

Sweating, Wesson stared into the screen. Pictured there, the alien met his eyes, and it was as if they spoke to each other, mind to mind, an instantaneous communication that needed no words. There was a piercing sweetness to it, a melting, dissolving luxury of change into something that would no longer have any pain… A pull, a calling.

Wesson straightened up slowly, carefully, as if he held some fragile thing in his mind that must not be handled roughly, or it would disintegrate. He said hoarsely, “Aunt Jane!”

She made some responsive noise.

He said, “Aunt Jane, I’ve got the answer! The whole thing! Listen, now wait—listen!” He paused a moment to collect his thoughts. “When two alien cultures meet, the stronger must transform the weaker with love or hate. Remember? You said you didn’t understand what that meant. I’ll tell you what it means. When these—monsters—met Pigeon a hundred years ago on Titan, they knew we’d have to meet again. They’re spreading out, colonizing, and so are we. We haven’t got interstellar flight yet, but give us another hundred years, we’ll get it. We’ll wind up out there, where they are. And they can’t stop us. Because they’re not killers, Aunt Jane, it isn’t in them. They’re nicer than us. See, they’re like the missionaries, and we’re the South Sea Islanders. They don’t kill their enemies, oh, no—perish the thought!”

She was trying to say something, to interrupt him, but he rushed on. “Listen! The longevity serum—that was a lucky accident. But they played it for all it’s worth. Slick and smooth. They come and give us the stuff free—they don’t ask for a thing in return. Why not? Listen.

“They come here, and the shock of that first contact makes them sweat out that golden gook we need. Then, the last month or so, the pain always eases off. Why? Because the two minds, the human and alien, they stop fighting each other. Something gives way, it goes soft, and there’s a mixing together. And that’s where you get the human casualties of this operation—the bleary men that come out of here not even able to talk human language anymore. Oh, I suppose they’re happy—happier than I am!—because they’ve got something big and wonderful inside ’em. Something that you and I can’t even understand. But if you took them and put them together again with the aliens who spent time here, they could all live together—they’re adapted.

“That’s what they’re aiming for!” He struck the console with his fist. “Not now—but a hundred, two hundred years from now! When we start expanding out to the stars—when we go a-conquering—we’ll have already been conquered! Not by weapons, Aunt Jane, not by hate—by love! Yes, love! Dirty, stinking, low-down, sneaking love!”

Aunt Jane said something, a long sentence, in a high, anxious voice.

“What?” said Wesson irritably. He couldn’t understand a word.

Aunt Jane was silent. “What, what?” Wesson demanded, pounding the console. “Have you got it through your tin head or not? What ?”

Aunt Jane said something else, tonelessly. Once more, Wesson could not make out a single word.

He stood frozen. Warm tears started suddenly out of his eyes. “Aunt Jane—” he said. He remembered, You are already talking longer than any of them. Too late? Too late? He tensed, then whirled and sprang to the closet where the paper books were kept. He opened the first one his hand struck.

The black letters were alien squiggles on the page, little humped shapes, without meaning.

The tears were coming faster, he couldn’t stop them—tears of weariness, tears of frustration, tears of hate. “Aunt Jane!” he roared.

But it was no good. The curtain of silence had come down over his head. He was one of the vanguard—the conquered men, the ones who would get along with their strange brothers, out among the alien stars.

The console was not working anymore; nothing worked when he wanted it. Wesson squatted in the shower stall, naked, with a soup bowl in his hands. Water droplets glistened on his hands and forearms; the pale short hairs were just springing up, drying.

The silvery skin of reflection in the bowl gave him back nothing but a silhouette, a shadow man’s outline. He could not see his face.

He dropped the bowl and went across the living room, shuffling the pale drifts of paper underfoot. The black lines on the paper, when his eye happened to light on them, were worm shapes, crawling things, conveying nothing. He rolled slightly in his walk; his eyes were glazed. His head twitched, every now and then, sketching a useless motion to avoid pain.

Once the bureau chief, Gower, came to stand in his way. “You fool,” he said, his face contorted in anger, “you were supposed to go on to the end, like the rest. Now look what you’ve done!”

“I found out, didn’t I?” Wesson mumbled, and as he brushed the man aside like a cobweb, the pain suddenly grew more intense. Wesson clasped his head in his hands with a grunt, and rocked to and fro a moment, uselessly, before he straightened and went on. The pain was coming in waves now, so tall that at their peak his vision dimmed out, violet, then gray.

It couldn’t go on much longer. Something had to burst.

He paused at the bloody place and slapped the metal with his palm, making the sound ring dully up into the frame of the Station: rroom… rroom…

Faintly an echo came back: boo-oom…

Wesson kept going, smiling a faint and meaningless smile. He was only marking tune now, waiting. Something was about to happen.

The kitchen doorway sprouted a sudden sill and tripped him. He fell heavily, sliding on the floor, and lay without moving beneath the slick gleam of the autochef.

The pressure was too great—the autochef’s clucking was swallowed up in the ringing pressure, and the tall gray walls buckled slowly in…

The Station lurched.

Wesson felt it through his chest, palms, knees, and elbows: the floor was plucked away for an instant and then swung back.

The pain in his skull relaxed its grip a little. Wesson tried to get to his feet.

There was an electric silence in the Station. On the second try, he got up and leaned his back against a wall. Cluck, said the autochef suddenly, hysterically, and the vent popped open, but nothing came out.

He listened, straining to hear. What?

The Station bounced beneath him, making his feet jump like a puppet’s; the wall slapped his back hard, shuddered, and was still; but far off through the metal cage came a long angry groan of metal, echoing, diminishing, dying. Then silence again.

The Station held its breath. All the myriad clicking’s and pulses in the walls were suspended; in the empty rooms the lights burned with a yellow glare, and the air hung stagnant and still. The console lights in the living room glowed like witch fixes. Water in the dropped bowl, at the bottom of the shower stall, shone like quicksilver, waiting.

The third shock came. Wesson found himself on his hands and knees, the jolt still tingling in the bones of his body, staring at the floor. The sound that filled the room ebbed away slowly and ran down into the silences—a resonant metallic sound, shuddering away now along the girders and hull plates, rattling tinnily into bolts and fittings, diminishing, noiseless, gone. The silence pressed down again.

The floor leaped painfully under his body, one great resonant blow that shook him from head to foot.

A muted echo of that blow came a few seconds later, as if the shock had traveled across the Station and back.

The bed, Wesson thought, and scrambled on hands and knees through the doorway, along a floor curiously tilted, until he reached the rubbery block.

The room burst visibly upward around him, squeezing the block flat. It dropped back as violently, leaving Wesson bouncing helplessly on the mattress, his limbs flying. It came to rest, in a long reluctant groan of metal.

Wesson rolled up on one elbow, thinking incoherently, Air, the air lock. Another blow slammed him down into the mattress, pinched his lungs shut, while the room danced grotesquely over his head. Gasping for breath in the ringing silence, Wesson felt a slow icy chill rolling toward him across the room—and there was a pungent smell in the air. Ammonia! he thought, and the odorless, smothering methane with it.

His cell was breached. The burst membrane was fatal—the alien’s atmosphere would kill bun.

Wesson surged to his feet. The next shock caught him off balance, dashed him to the floor. He arose again, dazed and limping; he was still thinking confusedly, The air lock—get out.

When he was halfway to the door, all the ceiling lights went out at once. The darkness was like a blanket around his head. It was bitter cold now in the room, and the pungent smell was sharper. Coughing, Wesson hurried forward. The floor lurched under his feet.

Only the golden indicators burned now—full to the top, the deep vats brimming, golden-lipped, gravid, a month before the time. Wesson shuddered.

Water spurted in the bathroom, hissing steadily on the tiles, rattling in the plastic bowl at the bottom of the shower stall. The light winked on and off again. In the dining room, he heard the autochef clucking and sighing. The freezing wind blew harder; he was numb with cold to the hips. It seemed to Wesson abruptly that he was not at the top of the sky at all, but down, down at the bottom of the sea—trapped in this steel bubble, while the dark poured in.

The pain in his head was gone, as if it had never been there, and he understood what that meant: Up there, the great body was hanging like butcher’s carrion in the darkness. Its death struggles were over, the damage done.

Wesson gathered a desperate breath, shouted, “Help me! The alien’s dead! He kicked the Station apart—the methane’s coming in! Get help, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

Silence. In the smothering blackness, he remembered: She can’t understand me anymore. Even if she’s alive.

He turned, making an animal noise in his throat. He groped his way on around the room, past the second doorway. Behind the walls, something Was dripping with a slow cold tinkle and splash, a forlorn night sound. Small, hard, floating things rapped against his legs. Then he touched a smooth curve of metal—the air lock.

Eagerly he pushed his feeble weight against the door. It didn’t move. Cold air was rushing out around the door frame, a thin knife-cold stream, but the door itself was jammed tight.

The suit! He should have thought of that before. If he just had some pure air to breathe and a little warmth in his fingers… But the door of the suit locker would not move, either. The ceiling must have buckled.

And that was the end, he thought, bewildered. There were no more ways out. But there had to be… He pounded on the door until his arms would not lift anymore; it did not move. Leaning against the chill metal, he saw a single light blink on overhead.

The room was a wild place of black shadows and swimming shapes—the book leaves, fluttering and darting in the air stream. Schools of them beat wildly at the walls, curling over, baffled, trying again; others were swooping around the outer corridor, around and around; he could see them whirling past the doorways, dreamlike, a white drift of silent paper in the darkness.

The acrid smell was harsher in his nostrils. Wesson choked, groping his way to the console again. He pounded it with his open hand, crying weakly—he wanted to see Earth.

But when the little square of brightness leaped up, it was the dead body of the alien that Wesson saw.

It hung motionless in the cavity of the Station, limbs dangling stiff and still, eyes dull. The last turn of the screw had been too much for it. But Wesson had survived…

For a few minutes.

The dead alien face mocked him; a whisper of memory floated into his mind: We might have been brothers… All at once Wesson passionately wanted to believe it—wanted to give in, turn back. That passed. Wearily he let himself sag into the bitter now, thinking with thin defiance, It’s done—hate wins. You’ll have to stop this big giveaway—can’t risk this happening again. And we’ll hate you for that—and when we get out to the stars—

The world was swimming numbly away out of reach. He felt the last fit of coughing take his body, as if it were happening to someone else besides him.

The last fluttering leaves of paper came to rest. There was a long silence in the drowned room.

Then:

“Paul,” said the voice of the mechanical woman brokenly; “Paul,” it said again, with the hopelessness of lost, unknown, impossible love.

Content

Stranger Station
by Damon Knight