Part 1

THE VANISHER

By MICHAEL SHAARA

_He was expendable, this Web Hilton, this young officer with the strange heritage. And so it was that he was ordered out into space where he saw the uncovered stars, and met the naked alien, and became the first man in history to die more than once._

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The two girls stayed to see the picture a second time and when they got out of the movie it was after midnight and raining and they couldn't get a cab. Louise bought a paper and put it over her head and ran off, laughing, in the direction of Albany Street. Ivy folded her kerchief and turned up Livingstone. She did not run. There was nothing wrong with rain, or with getting wet, and she enjoyed the coolness. She plunged her hands deeply into her coat pockets and did not bother to walk quickly at all.

The night was very dark, made darker by the rain, which was heavy and full. But Ivy was unconcerned. She was a small-town girl, country bred, with three huge brothers who knew every man in the county. She had grown up with a strong belief in the natural goodness of things, of people, and although she was young and slim and extremely pretty she had no worry now of walking home in the dark. This was her home town. She had lived here all her life. She passed by huge bushes and under the great clutching branches of trees without thinking at all of the things which could, and did, lurk behind them. She turned up Elmwood Road with her mind at rest, filled with skirts and dances and taffy pulls.

And her faith in people, as it turned out, was justified.

For the long arm that reached out of the bushes, the darkness, and plucked her with a rush into a deep black silence, was an arm of flesh, and an arm of bone, but it was very far from human.

* * * * *

The door opened at the top of the ramp and the colonel peered cautiously inside.

"Nobody here but us chickens," he said, sputtering in the rain, and the guard dropped the muzzle of the machine pistol and saluted.

The colonel stomped in onto the concrete floor, grumbling. He was followed by an enormous lieutenant, an immense, looming, cliff-shouldered man well over six feet tall. The lieutenant had to duck coming through the door, cast a downward salute to the startled guard. The colonel moved out from under the lieutenant's dripping overhang, pointed a lean wet finger down the hall.

"He here?"

"Yessir," said the guard, eyeing the monstrous lieutenant with respect.

The colonel wiped his face with a dry handkerchief, took off his hat and smoothed down his sparse white hair. Then he strode off down the concrete hall, motioning for the lieutenant to follow. Together they came to a bolted steel door. The colonel opened it without knocking, ushered the lieutenant inside.

The room they entered was wide and rich, oak-panelled, in great contrast to the white-washed concrete of the halls outside. In the center of the room was a mahogany desk, at which a small, sad, cigar-smoking man sat absorbedly drawing doughnuts on a white lined pad.

The colonel saluted. The man at the desk, whose name was Dundon, looked up at the big lieutenant and chomped on his cigar.

"Is _this_ our man?"

"Yes sir. Lieutenant Hilton. He knows--"

"Sure is a big bugger," Dundon said, rising. The lieutenant regarded him calmly.

"He knows every phase of the operation, sir," the colonel said.

"Of course. Sit down, boy," Dundon said briefly, waving his cigar. The lieutenant sat. "What's a few extra pounds? May need 'em, by God." He put the cigar in his mouth and clamped his hands behind him, walked around to the front of the desk and sat down on the edge of it.

"When's take-off, sir?" the colonel asked.

Dundon looked at his watch. "Less than an hour. Does he know?"

The colonel whistled. "That soon? No, he doesn't know anything."

The lieutenant had taken off his hat, showing himself to be much younger and blonder than he had first appeared to Dundon. He sat watching both men without any particular expression.

"Well, we'd better get on with it," Dundon said, and reached out a hand toward the colonel, without looking at him. "Do you have the lieutenant's records?"

The colonel reached quickly into his inside coat pocket, drew out a long folded envelope which he laid in Dundon's hand. The small man hefted it, looked briefly inside.

"Hell," he said curtly. "Got to save time. If we have to brief him and get ready I can't go through all this. What's the story?"

Before the colonel could say anything Dundon looked at the lieutenant with a wide, amiable, thoroughly unexpected smile. "Don't mind us son, no time for manners. Have a cigar."

The lieutenant politely refused. The colonel took off his coat and began to dry himself out, talking as he moved.

"Well, as far as I can recall, here's the poop. His name is Augustus Webster Hilton, Second Lieutenant, RA, out of Fort Benning. He's six foot six and a half, weighs two hundred and forty some odd pounds. Age: 25. Nickname: Web. AGCT score of 145."

Dundon's eyes lifted.

"He's got a head on him," the colonel agreed. "Army record superior to excellent. Present assignment instructing in orbits and trajectory at Base Training. Qualities of Organization, Leadership very high. Excellent officer material."

A slight fleeting frown crossed Dundon's face.

"Defects," the colonel said coolly. "Several minor, no major. Minor include a tendency to irk his superiors by failure to consult, by failure to keep his opinions to himself. Nothing unusual for the age, of course. Other defects are his size"--the lieutenant sat without moving through all of this--"and his blood type. He's got some rare kind of thing for which plasma is almost never available. That keeps him from front line duty."

The colonel stopped, began slowly to light a cigarette.

Dundon looked at him oddly.

"Nothing else?"

The colonel shook his head.

Dundon was suddenly flushed. "Wait a minute, son," he said to the lieutenant, and then he took the colonel by the arm and led him briskly into a corner.

"What the hell is this?" he hissed angrily, lowly, into the colonel's ear. "This boy looks like one hell of a good officer, what--"

The colonel held his finger to his lips, gestured cautiously.

"I couldn't tell you in front of him, chief."

"Couldn't tell me what? Listen, I'm not goin' to kill a young kid like--"

"It's Security. The major defect is Security."

Dundon quieted.

"What did he do?"

"Nothing he did. Chief, you won't like this. But it makes a big difference. You know the way Security is. They checked this boy all the way back to the cradle, found out things about him he doesn't know himself. His history checked all right, no trouble anywhere, except for his father. According to the records, he doesn't have any."

Dundon cocked an eyebrow. The lieutenant, unhearing, sat without looking at them.

"His mother claims to have married a man named Bruce Hilton in Chicago in 1930. There's no record of the marriage. Also, none of her friends ever met him. She went away from her home town--Evanston--and stayed for a year and came back with a baby, a wedding ring, and a very sad tale of a husband who died. There's no record of the death of any Bruce Hilton. She made up the name obviously. Her maiden name Finnerty."

Dundon stared. "So what the hell--" he began, but the colonel cut him off.

"So nobody knows. Just the boy's mother and Security. But Security has a special tab for cases like this. They figure like this: suppose the kid gets into a sensitive job, or gets to rank pretty high, and someone finds out about his, well, lack of parentage. You can't figure it. It could mean blackmail, it could mean security risk, or it could mean rumors among officers' wives, and a lot of nonsense like that. I know it doesn't sound like a thing you should hang a guy on, but, well, you know Security. They never take a chance. This kid will get to be a captain, maybe a major, maybe even an L.C. But he has no future in the army."

Dundon was looking down studiously at his shoes.

"So that's what you wanted," the colonel pursued, "somebody competent, but expendable. Right?"

Dundon looked up, his gray eyes filled with disgust. And then he realized that the colonel could not help it, did not like this either, and he patted him on the arm.

"Hell of a reason to kill a kid," he said softly, and turned back to the lieutenant, the man to be killed, who was sitting calmly in his chair and wondering when the brass was going to get to the point.

Dundon came back and sat down, and now with great kindness, told the lieutenant the story.

And so it was that Web Hilton went out into space, and saw the uncovered stars, and met the naked man, and became the first man in history to die more than once.

* * * * *

"You know of course," said Dundon, "that the satellite has been completed and is in orbit. The first crew went up on 9 September. Construction was finished on 20 September and the full crew was aboard within twelve hours. The whole thing went off without a hitch. There wasn't one thing we hadn't anticipated. We sent the green light to the president and sat back to wait for the Russians to find out what was 'up.'" He grinned momentarily at his joke.

"The station was in orbit for a week," he went on, "and we were in constant radio contact. Furthermore, we had it under radar and telescopic observation, either one or the other or both, twenty-four hours a day, from points all over the Earth. Some of that I guess you know. The purpose is mainly to supplement the station's own radar. We don't want anything going near that station without our knowing about it real quick."

"And we know damn well," he said more slowly, his puzzlement beginning to show in his voice, "that nothing went near that station."

Web still waited, not following at all. Dundon sat on the edge of his desk, beginning to fidget now as he talked. His stubby fingers were running continually through his thin gray hair, and tightening his tie, and tugging at his buttons, and toying with the desk top. He had been under a great strain for a long time and it was obvious.

"On 28 September," he said evenly, "--now get this--on 28 September, in the middle of the afternoon, we lost radio contact with the station. It cut off in the middle of a weather observation, just like that. There were no background sounds at all, no noise or confusion. Just silence. We waited, figuring of course that they had blown a tube, or something, but we didn't hear a thing. After a few minutes we began to get worried. They didn't come in on the emergency radio either.

"Radar reported the satellite was still in the regular orbit. Nothing looked wrong, but we couldn't contact her. After a couple of hours we began to get panicky. We figured a small meteor had hit her. A big one would have knocked her out of orbit, but a small one might have penetrated through and knocked out both radios without altering trajectory to any noticeable extent. We figured that that must have been it, because by this time five hours had passed and we hadn't heard a word.

"So then we managed to get Visual, as soon as it got dark and the satellite orbited to position. We had a prearranged system of light signaling to be used in case both radios failed. In the telescopes we could even see the reflectors sitting right out on the hub, completed untouched. But we waited all night and we never got a thing.

"Now dammit, it couldn't have been a meteor!" Dundon began to pace back and forth and both Web and the colonel followed him, absorbed.

"The station is shaped like a doughnut, with solid bulkheads all around. How could one meteor go all around the damn thing, kill everybody in it, knock out two separate radios, and still not disturb the orbit. It would take a swarm, obviously, even if you forget about the orbit, but there would have to be holes. And we had a close up view of that station, as close as the house across the street, and there wasn't a hole to be seen.

"Well, that night we sent up a rocket. Nothing big enough to show on radar had approached the station, or left it, so the only other solution was sabotage. One or more of the men we sent up had to be enemy agents, and they were obviously in control of the station. We had to make damn sure we got them out real quick. If necessary, we were set to blow up the station. And then it got worse."

Dundon stopped, came over and sat down on the desk in front of Web, looking straight at him, watching his reaction. Web was frozen in his chair.

"The rocket," said Dundon slowly, "never came back. It's still up there, floating along a few yards from the station. We can see it clearly. Too clearly, damn it. And the interesting part is this: nobody got out of the rocket. Nobody went into the satellite. The rocket went up and maneuvered itself into orbit alongside the satellite, and there it sits. We haven't been able to contact _it_ by radio either."

II

There was an icy sting lancing her arm, and then a million furry brushes began rubbing in her body. In a moment Ivy was totally paralyzed.

Black shapes, dripping and lean, picked her up gently, conducted her through the low hanging trees toward another place where a black square loomed. The hands were impersonal, but never in her life had she been touched like this. She was absolutely terrified. A door was opened. She was laid upon a dark hard floor. In a moment the floor began to move and she realized through her terror that she was in a truck. But they left her alone. She lay for a long while upon the floor unable to think. She could not possibly understand this, the who or the why, because she had not dreamed about it, or ever even considered it.

She was a girl of great natural sweetness, born of strict, respected parents and a strict, respectable life. What was happening now was so far from reality that she could not believe it. She lay on the floor of the truck trying to close her eyes, but the paralysis was too great and she couldn't. The truck drove on through the raining night, bumping, grinding, carrying her inevitably toward the worst day of terror she had ever known.

* * * * *

There was no question of sabotage. The men who went up, swore Security, were as clean as the driven snow. And in his own mind Dundon agreed. It was remotely conceivable that one man might just possibly slip through the incredibly complex Security check, but this was much too thorough a job. It would require too many men in too many places.

Dundon's next step was clear. Under the president's signature he had called for the Air Force file on flying saucers. He was disgusted to find that the Air Force knew no more than it had published, which was not very much. The file did, however, reach the tentative conclusion that "further investigation might well prove fruitful." Dundon was overcome. He seized a pen and wrote on the report--in great red angry letters--the indelible words:

"You bet your sweet--"

But even further investigation, Dundon realized when he had cooled to a touchable temperature, would probably not help. You could scan the skies with telescopes, until you wore your eyeballs down to the bone, but even if you saw, what could you do? He had a grave conviction that whoever went up to the satellite would not come down. There was no way of knowing what was up there or why, and it was a little more than possible that there was a lethal something about space itself which would never let Man off the face of the Earth. Not ever, for the rest of Time.

But somebody had to go. There was nothing else to do. You could not build another satellite, or send up another fully manned rocket, not until you found out what was wrong up there. There was always the chance that the failures were purely mechanical. Maybe, maybe, whoever was sent up would get back down.

And so a man was sent. He had to be a man with a thorough knowledge of the satellite, with an alert and adaptable mind, and at the same time a man whose failure to return would be of no great loss to anyone.

Such a man was Web Hilton.

* * * * *

"Never leave your suit," Dundon said urgently, "not for a damn minute. You'll have a large supply of oxygen, enough to see you there and back. Keep your eyes open and report whatever you see. We'll have a line attached to your suit running back through the rocket and broadcasting to us. We'll be in contact with you all the way."

And then he became embarrassed, as a man will in a position where he is sending someone else into a very dirty thing, and all he can do himself is nothing. So he said good luck and that was that.

The ship lifted shortly after midnight. Web rode up encased in his suit, along with the volunteer pilot who was the rocket's only crew. He did not speak to Dundon on the way up. He could not have spoken if he'd tried. But he endured the tremendous acceleration with the patient joy of a man who is about to do some very fast living. No more classes in Trajectory for him, no more teaching an endless chain of men no younger than himself to rise up above him and go out into space. He was an impatient man, he had always been an impatient man, so he rode out into blackness with no qualms at all. But he was not a fool. The qualms began very soon. They began with the sudden end of the acceleration.

The pilot--Joe Falk--spoke over the intercom to see if he was all right. He said he was. This was the signal for Dundon, from Earth, to cut in. They spoke back and forth, not saying very much, with cold shivers running through them, while Falk maneuvered into position. From his seat below the pilot Web could see nothing but wires, tubing, and a heavy stanchion. He waited. Eventually Falk said:

"Okay Web. In orbit. She's all yours."

Web took a deep breath. Dundon was speaking in his ear.

"Now watch yourself and tell me everything you see. Open the door and let's go."

Web freed himself from his straps, floated cautiously, hand over hand, to the hatch. Falk was right behind him. He spun the hatch and opened it, went through the airlock to the outer door, stepped out into space.

In the great blazing sea in which he found himself he paused for a second, immobile. The stars were brilliant beyond belief. He had forgotten that they would be of different colors, not just dull shades as seen from Earth, and the fiery reds, the yellows, the cool blues and blazing oranges stunned him. He held tight to the airlock, absorbing it all, while Falk came out behind him.

"God!" Web breathed.

"Wassamatter, wassamatter!" Dundon was immediately shouting.

"Nothing," Web said quickly, "I was just looking at the stars."

Dundon muttered something dark and profane. "To hell with the stars! Maybe that's what will get you. Man, watch the things that are close!"

"Okay," Web said with embarrassment, coming to himself and pulling his eyes away. But this was a sight he could not absorb all at once. He felt shaken for several minutes, and unutterably alone.

Off to his right, half-hidden by the bow of the ship, he saw the satellite. The huge gray ring was revolving slowly, rolling silently along above the great green plate of the Earth. Beyond it, dimly, he could see the floating black form of the first rocket. The entire scene was weird, unbelievable, and incredibly beautiful. He waited again while Dundon fumed from below, letting the sense of where he was sink into him. Falk did the same. At last, to Dundon's great relief, they were able to move.

They manned the small taxi pod, shoved off carefully in the direction of the satellite. Falk brought them with a gingerly caution to the turret of the hub. They had to stop a few feet away because the turret was revolving, and to try to land the pod while the turret was in motion was useless.

"Jump," said Dundon.

Web gulped. Although he had no sense of gravity, he could not help but feel the absolute emptiness all around him and beneath him. Between him and the Earth, straight down, there was a thousand miles of nothing.

But he rose in the taxi and braced himself. And jumped.

He shot across space and crashed head on into the turret, came very close to cracking his helmet against the gray steel. He swore feebly, but sincerely and with great fright, and clutched for a hold. He had greatly overestimated the power he needed to cross a space in which there was no gravity at all.

But he found a hold at last on a vane of the reflector and hung on grimly, desperately, for several moments.

Dundon asked how he was.

"Delightful," Web muttered, "absolutely delightful." Then he looked around for Falk.

The taxi had been kicked quite some distance away, Falk, white-faced through his helmet, was bringing her slowly back in.

"Easy when you jump, Joe," Web called. "I like to went right through this thing."

Falk grunted. He slipped a rope on the pod and leaped for the turret. Even warned he came in too hard and Web had to grab at him, wildly, with one hand. But now the hard part was done and they were aboard. Web looked around for the airlock.

* * * * *

Web went in alone. There was no need for both of them inside so Falk waited by the airlock and fed him the radio line. As he spun the wheel which opened the lock and looked down the long tube into darkness he began to feel for the first time the perspiration soaking him.

He took one last look at the whirling stars and then stepped inside the turret.

In the turret there was no gravity, but as he climbed down the landing net toward the rim of the revolving doughnut centrifugal force caught into him and gave him weight. It was immensely reassuring. He had a small sealed light at his belt which enabled him to see his way around and at the base of the turret he came to the main door into the satellite.

He stood on the net and regarded the door silently. Now, if there really was some sabotaging gent on board this thing, right behind this door now would be where he would be. He would have heard the boots clump on the steel, there was no doubt about that. And he would not be hampered by a space suit. Thoughtfully, Web considered the fact that he had no weapon. No weapon but his size. Up to now, this moment, that had always been enough, but he had no illusions about what would happen if there really was somebody alive in there. Still, Dundon would know, and that was his job after all, to let Dundon know.

"Well," said Dundon anxiously.

"Half a mo," Web said. He laid his helmet against the door and listened. Nothing. If he was inside, he wasn't moving. Which was the smart thing to do.

"Okay," Web said, "cross your fingers." He opened the door.

A great bright light shone out of the opening. For a brief moment he was startled, until he realized that it was only the normal electric light of the room, intensified by the black around him. Cautiously, with his handflash held like a club, he stepped into the room.

There was nobody behind the door.

"What's up, what's up?" Dundon called.

"Nothin'," Web said. "Listen, don't keep getting in my hair. I'll tell you what happens as I go along. I'm in the receiving room. Nobody here. But the lights are on."

The room was bare, metal-floored, lined with lockers. Two of the lockers were open, and from where he stood Web could see clothing hanging from pegs. There was nothing unusual about the room. Web described it to Dundon, walked across the floor to the next door.

"Don't take your helmet off," Dundon roared.

"You bet your sweet life," Web grinned. "I have to leave the doors open a little to let the radio line pass through. The pressure's going down pretty quick."