Part 1

_The ship went out safely, came back safely. The pilot was unaware of anything wrong. Somewhere in the depths of his brain was locked the secret that made him_

MAN ALONE

BY DON BERRY

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

_Phoenix I_ belled out smoothly in the region of a G-type star. There was a bright flare as a few random hydrogen atoms were destroyed by the ship's sudden appearance. One moment space had been empty except for the few drifting atoms, and the next--the ship was there, squat and ugly.

Inside, a bell chimed sweetly, signalling the return to a universe of mass and gravitation and a limiting velocity called C. Colonel Richard Harkins glanced briefly out his forward port, and saw no more than he had expected to see.

At this distance the G-type star was no brighter or yellower than many another he had seen. For a man it might have been hard to tell which star it was. But the ship knew.

Within one of the ungainly bulges that sprouted along the length of _Phoenix I_, a score of instruments mindlessly swung to focus their receptors on the nearest body of star-mass.

Harkins leaned contentedly back in the padded control seat and watched while the needles gradually found their final position on dials. A few scattered lights bloomed on the console ahead of him. He grunted once with satisfaction as the thermoneedle steadied at 6,000° C. After that he was silent.

He leaned forward and flipped up two switches, and a faint sound of a woodpecker came into the control room as the spectrograph punched its data on a tape. The end of the tape began to come out of a slot. Harkins tore it off when the spectrograph was finished with it, threaded it on the feeder spool of the ship's calculator, and inserted the free end in the input slot.

The calculator blinked once at him, as if surprised, and spat out a little card with the single word SOL neatly printed in the center.

Harkins whistled softly to himself, happily. _I had a true wife but I left her_, he whistled. Old song. Old when he first heard it. _Had a true...._

He wondered vaguely what a "wife" was, but decided it probably didn't matter. _Had a true wife but I left her_, he whistled.

He was glad to be home.

The direction finder gave him a fix on Earth and he tried to isolate the unimportant star from the others in the same general direction, but he couldn't do it, visually. The ship would do it, though, he wasn't worried about that. He wished he could use the Skipdrive to get a little closer. It would take a long time to get in close on the atomic rockets. Several days, maybe.

Well, he had to do it. The Skipdrive wasn't dependable in mass-space. You couldn't tell what it was going to do when you got it too close to a large mass. He'd have to go in on the chemical.

_Mass-space_, he thought. _Molasses-space, I call it._

Too slow, everything too slow, that was the trouble.

Reluctantly he switched off the Skipdrive's complacent purr. The sudden lack of noise in the cabin made him squint his eyes, and he thought he was going to get a headache for some reason. Abruptly, all the cabin furniture seemed very harsh and angular, distorted in some strange way so as to be distinctly irritating to him. He brushed his foot across the deck and the sound of his boot was rasping and annoying.

He didn't like this space much. It wasn't soft, it wasn't restful, it was all full of clutter and junk. He grimaced with distaste at the suddenly ugly console.

He looked down at the floor, frowning, pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger, flirting with the idea of turning the drive back on.

But for some reason he couldn't quite think of at the moment, he couldn't do that. He frowned more severely, but it didn't help; he still couldn't think of the reason he couldn't do it. That headache was coming on strong, now. He'd have to take something for it.

_Well, well_, he thought resignedly. _Home again, home again._

He was sure he was glad to be home.

_Home is the hunter, home from something something...._

He couldn't remember any of the rest. What the hell was a hunter, anyway? They irritated him, these nonsense songs. He didn't know why he kept thinking about them. Hunters and wifes. Nonsense. Babble.

He keyed the directional instruments into the course-control and armed the starting charge for the chemical motors. When he had checked everything carefully, as he had been taught, he strapped himself into the control chair with his hand on the arm-rest over the firing button. He knew it was going to hurt him.

He fired, and it did hurt him, the sense of explosive pressure, the abrupt thundering vibration. It was not the same as the soft, enfolding purr of the Skipdrive, comforting, assuring, loving....

_What's that? Loving?_

_A wife is a Martha_, he thought. _A Martha is a wife._

It seemed to mean something, but he didn't have time to decipher it before he passed out.

* * * * *

When he came to he immediately switched off the chemical drive. It had given him a good shove in the right direction, and that was all that was necessary. He would coast in now, and he had to save his fuel for maneuvering in atmosphere.

After that, he rested, trying to accustom himself to the harshness of things in mass-space.

His time-to-destination indicator gave him ten hours, when he began to feel uneasy. He couldn't pin-point the source of unease at first. He was fidgety, impatient. Or something that resembled those feelings. It was like when he couldn't remember why he wasn't supposed to turn the Skipdrive back on. It occurred to him that he wasn't thinking clearly, somehow.

He noticed to his surprise he had switched on his transmitter. Probably while he was drumming his fingers or something. He switched it off.

Thirty minutes later he found himself toying with the same switch. He had turned it on again. This was getting ridiculous. He shouldn't be so nervous.

He grinned wryly to himself. The transmitter switch, indeed. If ever a useless piece of junk had been put in _Phoenix I_, that was it. Transmitter switch!

He laughed aloud. And left the switch open.

He found himself staring with fascination at the microphone. It was pretty interesting, he had to admit that. It was mounted on the back of the control chair, on swivel arms. It could easily be pulled into position right in front of his face. Just as if it had been meant to. He fiddled with it interestedly, swinging it back and forth, seeing how it moved on the swivel arms.

He was interested in the way it moved so smoothly, that was all. By coincidence, when he let go of it, it was directly in front of him.

There was something picking at him, something was nagging at the back of his mind. He whistled under his breath and knuckled his eyes. He scrubbed at the top of his head with his right hand, as if he could rub the annoying thought. Suddenly he heard his own voice saying:

"Earth Control, this is _Phoenix I_. Come in please."

He looked up, startled. Now why would he say a thing like that?

And then, in the midst of his surprise, he repeated it!

"Earth Control, this is _Phoenix I_. Come in please."

He flipped the Receive switch without volition. His hands had suddenly developed a life of their own. He began to breathe more rapidly, and his forehead felt cool. He swallowed twice, quickly.

There was no answer on the receiver.

_No what? Answer? What is "answer"?_

"Estimate arrival four hundred seventy-two minutes," he said loudly, looking at the time-to-destination indicator.

There was a sudden flood of relief, washing away the irritation that had been picking away at the back of his mind. He felt at ease again. He turned off both transmitter and receiver and stood out of the control chair. He felt better now, but he was a little worried about what had happened.

He couldn't understand it. Suddenly he had lost control of himself, of his voice and his hands. He was doing meaningless things, saying things, making motions stupidly. Every movement he made, every act, was without pattern or sense.

He had a sudden thought, and it made his whole body grow cold and prickly, and he almost choked.

_Maybe I'm going Nova._

He was near the edge of panic for a minute. _Nova Nova Nova Nova._

Brightly flaring, burning out, lighting space around for billions of light years....

That was how it started, he knew. Unpredictability, variation without explanation.... He sat back down in the control chair, feeling shaky and weak and frightened.

By the time he had regained his balance, time-to-destination told him 453 minutes.

* * * * *

He guided _Phoenix I_ into an orbit around Earth. He circled three times, braking steadily with his forward rockets until he entered atmosphere.

On his fifth pass he spotted his landing place. How he knew, he didn't quite understand, but he knew it when he saw it. There was a sense of satisfaction somewhere in him that told him, "That's it. That's the right place."

Each succeeding pass was lower and slower, until finally he was maneuvering the ungainly bulk of the ship like a plane, wholly in atmosphere.

_Like a what?_

But he was too busy to worry about it. Fighting the _Phoenix I_ down in atmosphere required all his attention. Absently he noted the amazingly regular formations of rock surrounding his landing place.

His hands flew over the console automatically, a skilled performer playing a well-learned fugue without conscious attention to detail. The overall pattern was clear in his mind, and he knew with absolute confidence he could depend on his hands to take care of the necessary small motions that went to make up the large pattern.

He did not think: Upper left button third from end right bank rockets three-quarters correct deviation.

He thought: _Straight_. And his hand darted out.

The ground was near below him, now. He could see parts of the landscape through the port, wavering uncertainly in the heat waves from his landing blast.

Slower ... slower ... slower.... The roar was reflected loud off the flat below....

Touch.

_Perfect_, he thought happily. _Perfect perfect perfect._

He leaned contentedly back in the control chair and watched the needles of the console gauges fall lifeless back to the pins.

He whistled a little tune under his breath and smiled.

_Now what?_

Get out.

He couldn't think of the reason for it, but he would do it. While he waited for the hull to cool, he dropped the exit ladder, listened to the whine of the servomotors.

He opened the port and stood at the edge, looking out. His headache had come back again, worse than ever, and he grimaced at the sudden pain.

Before him stretched the flat black plane of the landing pad, ending abruptly in the regular formations he had noted before. They were mostly white, and contrasted strongly with the black of the pad. They weren't, he realized, rock formations at all, they were--

They were--buildings, they--

His mind shied away from the thought.

It was silent. His headache seemed to be affecting his vision, somehow. Either that or the landing pad wasn't cool yet. When he looked toward the--toward the white formations at the edge of the pad, they seemed to waver slightly near the ground. Heat waves still, he decided.

Nimbly, and with a pleasant sense of being home again, he scrambled down the ladder and stood on the ground, tiny beneath the clumsy shape of _Phoenix I_.

About halfway between the edge of the pad and his ship stood a tiny cluster of thin, upright poles. From their bases he could see black, snakelike cables twisting off toward the edge, shifting in his uncertain vision. He walked toward them.

The silence was so complete it was unnatural. It was almost as if his ears were plugged, rather than the simple absence of sound. Well, he supposed that was natural, after all. He had lived with the buzzing purr of the Skipdrive and the thunder of the rockets so long, any silence would seem abnormal.

As he drew closer to the upright rods, he saw each one was topped with a bulge, a vaguely familiar....

They were microphones! They were just like the microphone in _Phoenix I_, the one he had fooled with.

He was sincerely puzzled. All that transmit-receive gadgetry in the ship had been foolish, but what was he to think of finding it here on his landing pad? It didn't make any sense. He was getting the uneasy sense of confusion again. The headache was becoming almost unbearable.

He walked over to the cluster of microphones. That was probably the place to start. He took the neck of one in his hand and pulled it, but it didn't move smoothly, as the one on his control chair had. It simply tipped awkwardly toward him.

Suddenly he felt something on his shoulder, and looked around quickly, but could see nothing. The pressure on his shoulder remained, and he vaguely brushed at it with his hand. It went away.

He set the microphone back upright and looked back at his ship. There was another pressure on his opposite shoulder, sudden and harder than the first had been. He slapped at it, and stepped back, uncertainly.

One of the microphones tipped toward him, but he hadn't touched it. He took another step backwards, and felt something close tightly around his left arm. He snapped his head to the left, but there was nothing there.

He twisted sharply away to the right, and the motion freed him, but his shoulder hit something solid. He gasped, and his throat tightened again. He raised his hand to his head. The headache was getting worse all the time.

Something touched him on the back.

He spun, crouching.

Nothing.

He stood straight again, his eyes wide, panting from the fear that was beginning to choke him. His fists clenched and unclenched as he tried to puzzle out what was happening to him.

The air closed abruptly around both arms simultaneously, gripping so tightly it hurt.

He shouted and twisted loose and started to run back toward the ship. He stumbled against an invisible something, fell against another, but it kept him upright and prevented his falling. Several times as he ran, things he could not see brushed him, touched him on the shoulders and back.

By the time he scrambled up the ladder, his breath was short, and coming in little whimpers. The headache was the greatest pain he thought he could ever have known, and he wondered if he were dying.

He had to kick at invisible things that clutched at his feet on the ladder, and when he reached the edge of the port he stood kicking and flailing at nothing until he was certain none of the--creatures, things were there.

He shut the port swiftly and ran breathlessly up to the control room. He threw himself into the padded chair.

Finally he lowered his head into his hands and began to weep.

2.

Night.

The land turned gray and silver and white under the chill light of the rising moon. The buildings of Gila Lake Base IV were sharp and distinct, glowing faintly in the moonlight as if lit somehow inside the concrete walls.

On the landing pad, _Phoenix I_ squatted darkly, clumsily. The moon washed its bulbous flanks with cascading light that flowed down the long surfaces of the hull and disappeared into the absorbent blackness without trace. Tiny prickling reflections of stars glinted from the once-polished metal.

At the edges of the Base, where wire meshes stretched up out of the desert dividing the things of the desert from the things of men, nervous patrols paced forlornly in the night.

One of the blockhouses at the inner edge of the landing area presented two yellow rectangles of windows to the night. Inside the blockhouse were two men, talking.

One of the men was in uniform, and his collar held the discreet star-and-comet of a staff officer, SpaServ. He was young for his rank, perhaps in his early forties, with gray eyes that now were harried. He sat on the edge of his desk regarding the other man.

The second of the two was a civilian. He was slumped in an oddly incongruous overstuffed chair, with his legs stretched out straight before him. He held the bowl of an unlit pipe in both hands and sucked morosely on the stem as the SpaServ brigadier talked. He was slightly younger than the other, but his hair was beginning to thin at the temples. He had sharp blue eyes that regarded the tips of his shoes without apparent interest. Colin Meany was his name, and he was a psychiatrist.

Finally General Banning finished his account of the afternoon, raised his hands in a shrug, and said, "That's it. That's all we have."

Colin Meany took his pipe out of his mouth and regarded the tooth-marked bit curiously. He shoved it in his coat pocket and walked over to the window, looking out across the moon-flooded flat to the looming, ominous shape of _Phoenix I_. He stood with his hands clasped behind him, rocking gently back and forth on his toes.

"Ugly thing," he said casually.

Banning shrugged. The psychiatrist turned away from the window and sat down again. He began to fill his pipe.

"Where is he now?" he asked.

"In the ship," the general told him.

"What's he doing?"

Banning laughed bitterly. "Broadcasting a distress signal."

"Voice?"

"Does it matter?" the general asked.

"I don't know."

"No, it's code. It's an automatic tape. The kind all passenger vessels carry."

Colin considered this for a moment. "And he didn't say anything."

"Absolutely nothing," said General Banning. "He got out of the ship, walked over to the reception committee, slapped a few people and ran back to the ship and locked himself in."

"It doesn't make any sense."

"You're telling me?" After a second the general added almost wistfully, "He knocked Senator Gilroy down."

Colin laughed. "Good for him."

"Yeah," the general agreed. "That bastard fought us tooth and nail all the way down the line, cutting appropriations, taking our best men.... Then when we get a ship back, he's the first in line for the newsreels."

Colin looked up. "You have newsreels?"

"Sure, but I don't think they're processed yet."

"Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? Check them, will you?"

The general made a short phone call. When he hung up he looked embarrassed. "You want to see them?"

"Very much."

"There's a viewing room in Building Three," Banning said. "We can walk."

* * * * *

When the lights had come on again, Colin sat staring at the blank screen for a long time. Finally he sighed, stood and stretched.

"Well," Banning said. "What do you think?"

"I'll want to see it again. But it's pretty clear, I think."

The general looked up in surprise. "Clear? It's just the same thing I told you."

"Oh, no," Colin said. "You left out the most important part."

"What was that?"

"Your boy is blind and deaf."

"Blind and deaf! You're crazy. The ship, he looked at the ship, and the microphone, and...."

"Oh, it's pretty selective blindness," Colin said. He filled his pipe with maddening slowness and lit it before he spoke again.

"People," he said finally. "He doesn't see people. At all."

* * * * *

Harkins fell asleep leaning forward in the control chair with his head on his arms. When he wakened, the sky outside the viewport was turning dark. With a sense of sudden danger, he clamped down the metal shutters over the port. Methodically he climbed down catwalks the length of the ship, making certain all ports were secured both from entry and from sight. He didn't want to see outside.

When he had done this, he felt easier. Walking to the galley, he put a can of soup in the heater, and took it back up to the control room with him.

He sat there, absently eating his soup and staring ahead at the console. He noted he was beginning to get used to the harsh outlines it presented in this space. Suddenly he realized there was a red light on the board. He put the bowl of soup carefully on the deck and went over to the transmitter where a loop of tape was endlessly repeating itself, apparently broadcasting. He could not remember having inserted it. The empty spool lying beside the transmitter read AUTOMATIC DISTRESS CODE.

He understood all the words, all right, but put together they didn't seem to make any sense. AUTOMATIC DISTRESS CODE. What would it be for? Why would such a thing be broadcast? If you were in distress, you surely knew it without transmitting it.

He shook his head. Things were very bad with him. He was profoundly disturbed by his loss of control. Performing all sorts of meaningless actions without volition.... And now, with this tape, he had not even been conscious of the act, could not remember it.

He went back to the control chair and finished his bowl of soup.

Thinking about it, his meaningless activities had all been centered around one thing, this odd transmit-receive apparatus, this radio. He had looked at it before, and he realized it was very carefully constructed, and complicated. The wiring itself confused him. And more than that, he could not determine any possible use such a thing might have.

Thinking about it gave him the same prickly sensation at the back of his neck as when he thought about the nonsense words in the songs he knew. "Wife." Things like that.

He rubbed the back of his neck hard, until it hurt. He realized his headache had almost gone away when he secured the ports, but now it was coming back again.

Another light flashed on the console, and a melodic "beep--beep" began to sound from somewhere behind the panel.

Automatically he reached forward and flipped a switch, and the "beep--beep" stopped. Without surprise, he noticed it was the switch marked Receive.

So. When the light flashed and the "beep--beep" sounded he was supposed to throw that Receive switch. Presumably, then, he should receive something. Was that right?

He looked around the control room, but nothing happened.

Just on the edge of his consciousness there was a faint sussuration, but when he turned his attention to it, it disappeared. There was no sound. But when he thought of something else, it came back again.

It was like an image caught in the corner of his eye. There was nothing there, but sometimes you thought you caught just a flash of something out of the corner of your eye. Like this afternoon....

He shuddered at the recollection.

In all his life, he could not remember anything that had driven him into such pure panic as the loathsome invisible touches he had felt. What kind of creatures were these?

This was Earth. This was his home, it was where he belonged, and he couldn't remember anything about invisible....

Yes! Yes, he did remember! But there was still something wrong because--he couldn't think why.

He remembered walking on a grassy meadow on a spring day. The grass was rich and luxuriant and the sun was hot copper in the sky. He was walking toward the top of a hill. Right at the top there was a single small, green tree. He was going to go up and lie down under that tree and look down in the valley at the meadow. And beside him there was--a presence. He remembered turning to look, and--nothing. There was nothing there.

But the feeling of the presence next to him made him pleased, somehow. It was right. It was not menacing, like this afternoon, it was more--comforting. As the sound the Skipdrive made was comforting. It made him feel fine. But when he turned to look, there was nothing.

He could not remember.

What kind of presence? Like the ship? No, much smaller. Smaller even than himself. Compared to the ship, he was small, quite small. He was infinitely smaller than even planetary mass. And there were things on the ship that were smaller than he.