A voice boomed over the loudspeakers. “The captain is in quarters, prepare for countdown.”
The crew all hurried to their assigned stations, suited up and strapped in. The great doors were shut and sealed, the gantries rolled away, the engines fired up.
“Minus one and counting.”
We lay waiting for the fire-wind to seize and throw us at the sky.
And seize and throw it did.
Oh my God, I thought. Help me to shout, “We rise, we rise.”
But silence took us, like penitent monks, to its bosom.
For even the thundering rocket, which rips the soul on Earth, walks silently some few miles high, treads the stars without footfall, as if in awe of the great cathedral of space.
Free, I thought. No gravity. No gravity! Free. Oh, Quell, I find it most pleasant to be … alive.
Safely in orbit, let out of our constraints, I asked, “And now, what do we do?”
“Why, collect data,” said one of the crew.
“Add and subtract constellations,” said another.
“Photograph comets,” said a third. “Which means, capture God’s skeleton in an X-ray.”
Another crew member said, “I grabbed a flash of those passing comets. From such huge ghosts of suns, I borrow cups of energy to power our ship. Sweet alchemy, my game, but fine fun pumps my blood. All round lies death, but I greet even Death with, look, this grin.”
It was First Mate John Redleigh. I touched a computer screen, which whispered his name, and I saw there his log of the first hours of our journey: August 22, 2099. Out of sight of land, yes, out of sight of the blessed land, which means all Earth and those we hold dear upon it. All faces, names, souls, remembrances, streets, houses, towns, meadows, seas—gone. All longitudes, latitudes, meridians, hours, nights, days, all time, yes, time, too, gone. Christ, guard my soul. How lonely.
And to me Quell set free his thoughts: “Friend, I read minds, not futures. Space is large. They say it curves. Perhaps our end is our beginning. Our destination: far, very far, three mystery comets to be found by us in one constellation. Chart their course and map their routes, take their temperatures.”
“How long will we travel?” I asked.
“Ten years,” came the answer.
“My God, how boring,” I said.
“No,” said Quell, “for see how your God sends His meteors to entertain us.”
“Meteor strike!” a voice cried. “Deck seven. All hands report!”
We ran. All ran to the sounds of bells and klaxons and worked to repair the ship’s hull.
And at last I stood, back inside the hatch, taking off my helmet along with the rest of the crew.
And so it went, day in, day out—our ship hurtling through space, each of us with his assigned task, measuring, scanning, calculating, plotting a safe course among the broken stars.
And yet, with all this happening, still, after forty days out in space, not once did we see our captain. He stayed locked up in his cabin. But sometimes, at three or so in the deep morning, I heard the hiss of the elevator shaft, like a long, drawn-out sigh, and knew he was passing, rising up from the interior living and work levels to the outermost deck of his great ship, restricted to all but our ghost leader.
We all listened and heard.
In private, Downs said, “What does he do, up there? I hear he suits up, goes out alone, tethered by just one line.”
Someone answered, “Fool, he plays games with meteors, reaching out as if to catch them, even though he cannot possibly see them coming.”
And Quell added, “He shows no trust in our radar screens. Blind, he thinks he sees clearer and beyond the human eye.”
“Sees what?” I asked. “Quell, you catch his thoughts. What?”
Quell was silent for a few moments, then said, “My mind hears, but the captain’s mouth must speak. It is not for me to say. When he finds what he searches for, he will let us know. He—”
Suddenly Quell put his strange hands to his face, and from far off we heard the captain’s cry over the intercom.
“No, no!” Quell yelled, and fell to his knees. He collapsed before us, and contorted one of his hands into a fist, eyes shut.
Quell shook his fists at the unseen stars. “Gah!” cried Quell, as if possessed. “No more of this, no more!”
And, suddenly, all was quiet. No sound came from the intercom, and Quell’s arm dropped to the deck. He stood, weakened, shaken by this strange thing that had happened.
I went to my friend. “Quell,” I said. “Tell me what just happened. That was not you, was it? That was the captain. You knew the captain’s mind, you acted as he did, yes?”
“No,” said Quell, quietly.
“Yes,” I insisted. “You have no reason to defy the stars. It was he who raised his fist at the universe.”
But Quell refused to respond, turning his gaze upward instead.
From First Mate John Redleigh’s log: Fifty days out. Correction: twelve hundred hours out from Earth. Student, do your sums. Computer, electro-psychoanalyze my soul. Thrust your finger, First Mate Redleigh, in a computer socket. What would you find? John Redleigh, born 2050, Reedwater, Wisconsin. Father, a maker of outboard motors. Mother, a baker of children, a dozen in all, of which the plainest of plain bread is old John Redleigh. Old, I say. Old when I was ten, long gone in senility by thirteen. Married a fine plain woman at twenty-two; filled the nursery by twenty-five. Read occasional books, thought occasional thoughts. Ah, God, Redleigh, haven’t you more to put in this damn machine? Are you so stale, flat, unbumped, untouched, unscarred, unmoved? Have you no nightmare dreams, secret murders, drugs, or drink in your soul? Is your heart missing, the pulse spent? Did you give over when you were thirty, or were you ever more than a dry biscuit, an unbuttered bun, flat wine? Pleasantly sensual, but never passionate. A good husband, fair friend, far traveler, without worry, coming and going so quietly that God himself never noticed. And when you die, Redleigh, will even one horn sound? Will one hand flutter, one soul cry, one tear drop, one door slam? What’s your sum? Let’s finish it. There, there it is: zero. Did my secret self put those ciphers there? Feed zero, get zero? So I, John Redleigh, sum myself.
“You there,” said Redleigh, as I passed him outside the door to the captain’s cabin.
“Sir,” I said.
“Don’t jump. What are you doing here ? Shouldn’t you be on the quarterdeck?”
“Well, sir,” I said, nodding at the captain’s door. “Six days. Isn’t that a long time for the captain to be shut in? I can’t help but wonder … Is he all right? I have an urge to knock upon his door.”
Redleigh regarded me for a moment, then said, “Well, then …”
I stepped quietly to the door and rapped upon it lightly.
“No, no,” said Redleigh. “Let me show you.”
And he stepped up and knocked hard on the door with his fist.
He waited a moment, then knocked again.
I said, “Does he never answer, then?”
“If he knew that God Himself were out here, he might venture forth for a chat. But you or me? No.”
Suddenly there was the sound of a bell, a klaxon, and from the intercom a voice spoke: “Hear this! Captain’s inspection. All hands assemble, main deck. All hands, Captain’s inspection.”
And we turned and ran.
All gathered, five hundred strong, on the main deck.
“In line!” called Redleigh, from the head of the assembly. “He’s coming, the captain is coming. Tenshun!”
There was a faint hum, a touch of electrical sound, which wavered like a swarm of insects.
The door to the main deck hissed open, and the captain was there. He stepped forward three steady, slow paces and stopped.
He was tall, well proportioned, and his uniform was completely white. The great shock of his hair was almost white, with faint traces of gray.
Over his eyes he wore a set of opaque radar-vision glasses, in which danced small firefly electric traces.
To a man, we held our breath.
At last he spoke.
“At ease.”
And, as one, we let out our breath.
“Redleigh,” the captain said.
“All present, sir.”
The captain traced the air with his hands. “Yes, the temperature has gone up ten degrees. All present, indeed.”
He moved along the front line, then stopped, one hand out, hovering near my face.
“Ah, here’s one who runs the very furnace of youth. Your name?”
“Sir,” I said. “Ishmael Hunnicut Jones.”
“God, Redleigh,” said the captain, “isn’t that the sound of Blue Ridge wilderness or the scarred red hills of Jerusalem?”
Without waiting for a response, he continued, “Well, now, Ishmael. What do you see that I don’t?”
Staring at him, I pulled back, and from the far side of my mind, in a panic, I whispered, “Quell?”
Suddenly I knew that if I should seize the captain’s dark machine electric lenses, behind them I would find eyes the color of minted silver, of fish that had never been born. White. Oh, God, this man is white, all white.
And in my head I heard Quell, a shadow upon the air: “Some years ago the universe set off a light-year immensity of photographic flash. God blinked and bleached the captain to this color of sleeplessness and terror.”
“What?” the captain demanded, for he had sensed our thoughts.
“Nothing, sir,” I lied. “And there is nothing I can see that you do not.”
I waited for his reply, but none was forthcoming. Instead, he turned and walked back to the head of the assembly and spoke. “How runs a ship in space, men?”
The crew murmured, and one replied, “With tight seams and oxygen suits at the ready, sir.”
“Well said,” the captain replied, and continued. “And how do you treat a meteor, men?”
This time I gave him the answer. “A seven-second patch and all hands saved, sir.”
The captain paused at this, and then gravely asked, “Then how do you swallow a flaming comet whole, men?”
Silence.
“No answer?” thundered the captain.
Quell wrote invisibly on the air. “They have not as yet seen such comets, sir.”
“They have not,” the captain said. “And yet such comets do come by. Redleigh?”
Redleigh touched a control pad and a star chart descended from the ceiling before us. It was a three-dimensional work of art, a chart-maker’s multi-textual dream of the universe.
The captain reached out a blind hand.
“So, here, in miniature, is the universe.”
The star chart blinked.
The captain went on. “Will your eyes accomplish what mine, gone dead, cannot? From the regions of the Horsehead Nebula, among a billion fires, one special light burns. Blind, I feel its presence thus.”
He touched the center of the screen. At that instant, a vast, long, beautiful comet was illumined before us.
“Do I touch the maelstrom, Redleigh?” the captain said.
“Yes, sir,” replied Redleigh, as the crew whispered at the vast beauty revealed.
“Closer. Brighter,” commanded the captain.
The image of the comet brightened to an immense ghost.
“So,” said the captain. “Not a sun, a moon, or a world. Who’ll name it?”
“Sir,” said Redleigh, gently. “That is merely a comet.”
“No!” shouted the captain. “It is not merely a comet. That is a pale bride with flowing veil come back to bed her lost unbedded groom. Isn’t she lovely, men? A holy terror to the sight.”
We stood silent, waiting.
Redleigh, moving closer, said, “Captain, is that not the comet that first passed Earth some thirty years ago?”
And I, half-remembering, spoke and gave its name: “Leviathan.”
“Yes!” the captain said. “Speak up! Again!”
“Leviathan,” I repeated, wondering what was going on. “The largest comet in history.”
The captain whirled away from the star screen and turned his blind gaze upon us. “The brute chemistry of the universe thrown forth in light and trailing nightmare. Leviathan!”
“Was it not Leviathan, Captain,” said Redleigh, softly, “that put out your eyes?”
The men murmured and stared harder at the beautiful beast.
“But to give me great vision!” the captain said. “Yes! Leviathan! I saw it close. I touched the hem of its great million-mile-long bridal veil. And then that virgin whiteness, jealous of my loving glance, rubbed out my sight. Thirty, thirty, thirty years ago. I still see it on my inner lids every night, so passing strange, so full of Arctic miracles, that huge white thunderhead of God. I ran to it. I offered up my fevered soul. And it snuffed me out! And then it ran, leaving me. Yet look.”
He touched the three-dimensional chart and the comet brightened yet again, loomed even larger.
“Leviathan returns,” said the captain. “I have waited thirty long years, and the moment has finally come. And I have chosen you, men, to be with me on this starship to rush and meet that downfell light, which having once doomed me now cycles round to doom itself. Soon, I will lift my hands—your hands—to make that strike.”
The men stirred, but said nothing.
“What?” the captain said. “Silence?”
“Sir,” Redleigh said, “that is not our mission, our destination. What of our loved ones on Earth …”
“They will know of it! And they will celebrate when we have bled this beast and interred it in the Coalsack Nebula burial ground.”
“But questions will be asked, sir,” said Redleigh.
“And we will answer those questions. And we will complete our mission. After we have dealt with Leviathan. We must learn the stuffs of pure destruction. Look on Leviathan! What is it? Some dread thing torn from out God’s throat when He knew darkness in His sleep? Gone evil with time, gone tired with creation, did God frighten up his bones and mind and lungs in one titanic seizure to cough forth this sickening? Who knows, can guess, or tell? All I know is that old curse and bled-forth wound now terrorizes space and ravens at our heels.
“Let us speak gently now. Wherever God now is, why, spring and sweet winds play. But with Leviathan, all dies and bleeds away. Great God, I worship thee. But thy old ailment comes to winnow me and split my bones and kindle up dead eyes to half an obscene light. So madness gives me strength for this last night. Insanity makes grasp both long and broad. Once clutched and killed, Leviathan, I will turn back to my God.”
We stood, as if spellbound.
Redleigh at last dared to propose: “This hell you speak of … is it quite that Hell?”
“Why,” said the captain, “there’s Death himself come round to even up old scores. God sums Himself on Earth four billion strong. But here’s the beast to make that right go wrong. Within a month, this light-year creature, mid-Pacific, will submerge and murder all that’s living on Earth.”
“But our scientists, sir—” began Redleigh.
“Are blind!” yelled the captain. “No, worse! For even blind, I see! On other journeys, Leviathan missed our Earth by a million miles or more.”
“And this time round,” insisted Redleigh, “the calculations show that it will miss Earth by six times as much.”
“Your wise men say Survival? I say Death,” the captain roared. “Our funeral comes this way. Changed, pulled, put on new tracks by far dark worlds beyond our sight, put off by gravities of malice, Leviathan now veers to doom us. Does no one see or care?”
We in our ranks shifted uneasily. What our captain spoke seemed madness, and yet he was so sure, so strong.
“We must take care now,” said Redleigh finally, “if what you say is true.”
“Aye to that!” we yelled as one.
“Proof, now, Redleigh,” said the captain. “Here are my charts.” He pulled a slim disk from his coat and held it out in the direction of Redleigh’s voice. “Computerize these as far as you or God can count and then beyond.”
“I will take your charts, sir,” said Redleigh, gravely.
“Quickly,” said the captain. “Scan, study, see.”
Redleigh turned the disk over in his hands.
“For there you will find Doom,” the captain went on. “But, if serenity, sweet peace, and mild excursions are your findings, man … if you discover instead fair Heaven and find green Eden, say your say with graceful data! Play the computer. If your final tune is joy, I will accept it, and turn us back toward stallion and mare meadows and fine frolics; no remorse.”
“Fair put, sir.”
“Where’s your hand?” said the captain, reaching out upon the air.
“Here, sir.”
The captain seized it. “Now man, attend. Here’s one who gives his palm on palm to me. May I beg hearts and souls from all the rest?”
“They’re here!” came all our voices.
“And all about!” I added.
“Aye and aye!” cried many voices.
The captain still held tight to Redleigh’s hand, binding him to his compact as he cried out a final oath: “Christ’s wounds swallow comets! Much thanks for that sweet sound. Men! Ours is a holy mission. There will be none greater in the history of humanity, though our sands run forever through a glass as big as Creation’s landfall in far Centauri! We will save our Earth! Technicians, stand alert! Oh, men, Leviathan is a long white unhealed wound in space, a light that puts out light. Let us heal it forever. Ready the alarms. The first man who spots it gets double his pay for the journey! Squads, disperse. Fall out!”
The crew ran to their stations, all but Quell. Sensing that my friend was not with me, I pulled up short, and turned to see Quell, gazing at the captain with a look of terrible revelation. Redleigh, too, took note of Quell’s expression, and stood quietly beside the captain.
The captain, feeling the silence, said, “Dismissed, Redleigh.”
“Sir.”
And Redleigh turned and walked away.
“Ishmael?” the captain said suddenly. “Dismissed.”
“Sir!” I saluted to those blind eyes, and started to leave but hesitated to look back at the captain and Quell.
The captain sensed Quell drawing near. And yet Quell would not look at him. The captain raised a hand to touch the air near Quell’s strange green face. He seized his hand back as if it was half-burnt. Then he turned and stepped back through the door leading off the main deck and the door whispered shut.
There was a long moment in which Quell’s face gathered shadows of his own future. I could not bear to witness it.
And then I heard the voices of the crew, coming from all around, one by one.
“The comet Franciscus 12.”
“Halley’s comet.”
“The comet of Pope Innocent the Third.”
“The Great India comet of ’88.”
“The comet of Alcibiades.”
And on the great star screen, one by one, I saw gigantic manifestations of comets, meteors, star clusters, all of which hung themselves on the dark.
“What is a comet, anyway?” I heard myself say. “Who knows, really,” I answered myself. “Universal vapors. The mighty indigestion of our creator. Quell?”
Quell’s thoughts touched mine.
“On my world, such comets are known as pilgrim visitors, far-traveling specters, haunters of the feast. You see? Our history has as much romantic nonsense as yours.”
“Well, then,” I said, “the captain has his reasons for seeking his comet, and we have ours. There’s nothing like a riddle.”
“A riddle,” said Quell. “Let us sleep on that tonight. Perhaps in sleep, we’ll dream, and in the dream, find an answer. A riddle. A riddle.”
And it was in the midst of the night, while I slept, that I heard something stirring. Quell. I felt his mind move in mine and then, at last, his voice: “May all the men rise up and listen.”
Then, not only in my mind, but with his tongue, Quell said the syllables that made “Elijah.”
“Quell,” I whispered faintly.
And then how strange it was, for it was not Quell’s voice that I heard now, in the middle of the night, but the voice that spoke in his mind. It was the voice of Elijah, recalled.
“Oh, listen, hear!” said the voice that I’d last heard in the cathedral on Earth. “Aboard this ship, far out in space, there will come a time when you see land where there is no land, find time where there is no time, when ancient kings will reflesh their bones and reseat their crowns.”
“What’s that?” I heard from some other room along the corridor.
“Shut him off, shut him up,” cried another.
“No, wait, wait,” I whispered.
And Quell continued with the voice of Elijah: “Then, then, oh, then, ship, ship’s captain, and ship’s men, all, all will be destroyed. All save one!”
“All?” someone said.
“Save one,” said another.
“All will be destroyed,” said Quell, with the voice of Elijah.
And then he sank back into silence and slept.
I turned over but could not sleep, and sensed my crewmates in their cubicles, up and down the corridor, sleepless till dawn.
The voice clock in every cabin ticked and named the hours and at last, with no sunrise, in our minds we saw a ghost comet loom in spirit smoke above the captain’s bunk, and the captain mourned his own death in his sleep.
From the log of First Mate John Redleigh: Records dating 400 B.C. Rumors have it that Alexander the Great’s death was predicted in the appearance of the comet Persephone. The comet Palestrina arrived in the year one; it may well have been the Star of Bethlehem. This much we know, but little more. The main material of a comet’s body is methane gas and wintry snow, wintry snow.
Unable to sleep, I arose and left my bunk, drawn to the captain’s cabin. From outside that sealed door I could hear his nightmares within. “No,” I heard him groan. “No, no, I say. Get off. Go!”
A figure came along the corridor: Redleigh. I pulled back into the shadows as the first mate pounded on the captain’s door.
“Captain?”
The captain called out from within. “What? What?”
“You were having a nightmare, sir,” said Redleigh.
The door opened and the captain stood there, his white hair wild. “God, I dreamt I fell, I fell, down in space, forever. Let me grasp my soul.”
“Ship’s log to be signed, sir,” said Redleigh.
“At four in the false morning? Good, Redleigh, something to keep me from my nightmares. I’ll come with you to sign. How go the star computers?”
“They burn, sir, from overuse.”
“You jump to prove me wrong?”
“You have said you were right, sir,” said Redleigh. “I would prove that.”
The captain stepped out of his cabin, and I moved back further into the shadows, even though he could not see me. They started down the corridor, toward the main deck, and I followed along.
“I know you, Redleigh. You have no heart for this chase, do you?”
“If by ‘chase’ you mean our proper business of charting stars and exploring worlds …”
“No, no! Here!” the captain said as he emerged onto the vast main deck, nearly empty now, and pointed toward the star screen. The three-dimensional display hung brightly on the air.
“What do you know of the passage of dark planets and bright comets?”
“I think you must teach me, sir,” said Redleigh.
“And I will,” said the captain. “Here are a thousand thousand star-charts, stamped, runneled, and humped. Run your hand over this expanse. Touch the long mark of Halley’s comet; feel the heat of the comet of Alliostro Minor. Here, the deep night plans for all God’s circuitings and maunderings, all his long thoughts. God dreams joy: green Earths appear. God suffers torments: Leviathan issues from the vast portal of His raving eye and mouth. It rushes here! I know a way to meet it head-on, fast, six weeks before it destroys Earth. We must move fast to surprise it.”
“Surprise?” Redleigh turned from the charts that hung so brightly on the air. “You cannot surprise a comet, sir. It neither lives nor cares.”
“But I live, I care,” said the captain.
Redleigh shrugged. “And shift the burdens of your knowledge to some great wandering child, some universal accident that prowls the worlds, homeless for eternity. I —”
“Go on,” said the captain.
“Sir, if as the Reverend Colworth says, all space is one flesh with us, all worlds, suns, creatures extensions of one ground, one all-encompassing will, then that ghost you speak of, sir, that comet, that great terror-trailing monster, is but a true out-mouthing of God Himself. Not his sickness and despair, but His bright will that lights the universal night. Would you stand against such breath?”
“If it wrenched my soul and burnt me blind, yes! Listen to the sound it makes this very hour, out beyond.”
The captain reached out a hand, touching a screen. A loom of energy wove immense sounds throughout the ship.
Nodding at this, the captain continued. “There’s the breath you spoke of. It is a cold thing. It is all the graveyards of history somehow put to space, and in its light-year shroud, ten billion on a billion men’s lost souls yammer for release. I—we—go to rescue them!”
“That sound is but a dumb thing, sir, mere chemistry born of chaos, now pulled by this tidal star, now hauled by that. You may as well stop your own heart as try to stop that great pale beating.”
“But if both stop at once?” said the captain, “will not my victory over it be as large as its victory over me? Small man, great traveling doom—both weigh the same when the scale is death.”
“But in rending it,” said Redleigh, in quiet desperation, “you rend your own flesh, Captain, which God has loaned you.”
“This flesh offends me!” cried the captain. “If it is all one, God manifesting himself in minerals, light, motion, dark, or sensible man, if that comet is my sister-self come preening by to try my Joblike patience, was it not blasphemy it first tried on me? If I am God’s flesh, why was I felled, struck blind? No, no! That thing is lost and evil. Its great face hovers in the abyss. Behind its mindless glare I sense the blood that oils the cogs of nightmare and the pit. And whether I perceive all this in hell-fire man, sweet blood-mouthed cannibal shark, or huge white blinding mask flung down among the stars to frighten men and push them to impulse much less than human, more than bones and soul can bear, I must attack. Talk not of blasphemy to me, sir. It tried me at breakfast. I will dine on it tonight.”
“Oh God,” whispered Redleigh. “Oh God help us, then.”
“He does,” the captain responded. “If we are His stuffs, alive, then we sinew His arm, thrust out to stop that light-year beast. Would you turn away from this greatest hunt?”
“I would,” murmured Redleigh, “and go to check my computers, sir.”
Redleigh turned to leave, but stopped when the captain said, “Why then you’re as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust ‘reality’ and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings. Lie down with machines, rise up castrato. Sweet Jesus, you’ll make the pope’s choir yet. Such innocence quakes my bones.”
“Sir,” Redleigh responded. “I am against you. But don’t fear me. Let the captain beware the captain. Beware of yourself … sir.”
And once more Redleigh turned, and this time he walked away.