Title: The Voyage of Vanishing Men
Author: Mullen, Stanley
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Voyage of Vanishing Men" ***


               Earthmen had never ventured into the vast
            unknown beyond the galaxy. But now a survey was

                      The Voyage Of Vanishing Men

                           By Stanley Mullen

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
                              April 1955
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


They still talk of Braun, and the Fourth Intergalactic Survey.

Other men before him had gone out into the far, dark places. Three
previous expeditions had gone out and vanished completely. Then the
_Venture IV_ went out and out and out countless miles and light-years
and whatever else it is--and out there in the lonely darkness something
happened. Nobody knew exactly what happened, but there was a lot of
guessing. Only one man came back. Braun. And there was talk....

Tending bar anywhere is better, they say, than an academic degree in
psychology. Tending bar on one of the way stations to the stars you
see people--most of them human--as they really are, and in all stages
of emotion. You see them coming and going, and a few already gone. By
little signs, you can tell a lot about them, and make a guess at what
is wrong with the wrong ones.

There was Braun.

Angular as a stick-bug, he stood at the bar, elbows digging into the
polished mahogany, one foot cocked on the rail. He was drinking alone
as if it had become a habit, and the customers edged away from him as
if not wanting to make it too obvious. As usual, his go-to-hell face
looked past you into the backbar mirror and out again to cover the
whole place. He was older and changed, though, as he would be. Deep
lines furrowed the tight, tanned, leathery features, and his eyes still
held some of that awful emptiness of space between the star-packs.

Nobody said anything, at first.

Braun watched them, a humorous half-defiant glint in his eye. But there
was pain in him, in his voice as he spoke.

"What's the matter? Am I poison, or something?"

Somebody said it, then. In a stage whisper. "I had friends on the
_Venture IV_."

"So did I," Braun answered quickly. "A lot of friends. So before
somebody works up nerve to ask, I don't know."

"Don't know?" a man named Cutter pursued the point coldly. "You were
there!..."

"I was there," admitted Braun. "I still say it. I don't know what
happened to anybody. I've told the authorities that over and over. I've
told anybody who'd listen. You don't have to believe me. I don't give
a--"

"Nobody's told us anything," Cutter insisted. "We haven't heard a
whisper about it. And, speaking for all of us, we'd like to be sure
about you ... before we go on drinking at the same bar...."

It was going to be like that as long as Braun lived. People will talk,
and if there's a choice, they'll guess the ugly thing, every time.
Wherever he went, there would be people to ask that question, and
somebody to smirk if he answered it.

You could see trouble coming. Whatever Braun answered....

Braun was never a man to talk much about himself. It was always
the places he had been and seen, or wanted to go. Like all old-time
spacemen, he was a bird of passage. Between trips, he came in a few
times, got to be a fixture. But he was always coming or going somewhere
never lighting or staying put.

You don't learn too much about a man in a bar, casually. Little things
add up and hint at the bigger ones. You can call him by his first name
casually, and hash over mutual acquaintances, that's all.

Maybe you talk about the things men talk about. Life and death. Men
and spaceships. Life on distant worlds. Braun had knocked around the
galaxy like a lot of people since the DuMont space-time drive came
into general use. He had seen more than the ordinary man even dreams
about, but there was always a restless and curious wondering about more
distant stars and their planets. On one classic occasion, you even
helped him wonder about other galaxies, and if the new drive would ever
take men out into the far, dark spaces where ships never ventured.

When Braun's big break came, you heard about it from someone else,
since Braun was far away, at a planet-base circling a star that was
just a number in a catalog. There were no formal goodbyes out there,
just technical admonitions. Then a speck diminished into nowhere, with
no instruments to track an object accelerating into speeds so many
times greater than light that mathematics became weird paradoxes, and
nothing existing in normal dimensions even makes sense.

       *       *       *       *       *

Eventually the ship came back, and Braun with it. Nobody knew much more
than that. No official announcements were made, no actual denials or
accusations. Rumor hinted at ugliness, and an investigation going on.
People made the usual wild and extravagant guesses, and there were the
formless whispers that start nowhere and end nowhere.

Braun put his back to the bar and looked over the crowd soberly, one by
one. This must have happened to him many times before, as it probably
would again. Braun had his own way of dealing with such situations, and
maybe he was right.

"I don't know what happened," he said slowly. "I'll say it again, just
once. I don't know. If you don't like it, I'm here, waiting. One at a
time, or the whole ratpack of you. How do you want it?"

In any real, deadly brawl, voices are rarely raised. There is no loud
and explosive discussion. Instead, all movement jells, crystallizes in
utter silence. Something breaks it. Something like a flung beermug.
Then comes a five-ring circus of action.

Braun ducked. The beermug struck in foaming, splintering destruction.
The backbar mirror dissolved in a chiming avalanche of glass.

Cutter led the rush. Braun's back was braced to the bar. He seemed
oddly relaxed, almost happy. Somebody heaved another beermug. It
missed, but most of the beer splashed into Braun's face and trickled
slowly down him.

"I like beer," he said, "but not that well."

Like a spring letting go, Braun snapped out to meet them. His long arms
caught Cutter and hoisted him high, then hurled him bodily over the
stick and into the stacked glassware.

By then, if not before, you eased toward the light switch and cut
it. Darkness slammed down like a solid barrier. But other solids
moved through it, colliding, grunting, swearing, shouting, sometimes
groaning. Gradually, the tumult died out of itself.

When the lights came on again, Braun still stood at the bar, though
several places further down. The darkness had been kind to him. With
everyone against him, he could work freely. And at saloon brawling, he
was a master craftsman. Casualties held to a minimum, but there were
plenty of cotton and catgut, splint and plaster cases. Cutter was still
out, cold, and went to the hospital with the others. Not everyone joins
in a rough-house, and enough clear-headed witnesses remained to spare
Braun any risk of charges. His fists were red and raw, but he seemed
unhurt, bodily.

Somebody offered him a drink. But Braun just stood and looked at it,
then raised his head to glance up where the backbar mirror had been.

"Someday, they'll use stainless steel for that," he said. "Then half
the fun will be gone."

Slowly his face screwed up tight, the leathery skin wrinkling like a
withered apple. Eyes closed, he hammered a raw fist on the bar till
blood spurted. He was like a hurt child trying to hurt himself more to
get even with fate.

"I had friends on the _Venture IV_," he cried wildly. "A lot of good
friends. What happened to them? Where are they?..."

Calming down, he started talking. His voice was oddly detached, and so
low you could hardly hear him.

"I was the ninth man," he said. "The rest were all techs, of one kind
or another. I was the only spacetramp aboard. I've often wondered
why they picked me, but somebody must have had a good reason. Maybe I
was the catalyst. Each of the others could do one job extremely well.
I could take over and do anything in an emergency--not as well, but
a scratch job to keep the show on the road. And when the 'ologies'
developed friction, I was the lubricant--the guy with no axe to grind
who kept the other's axes sharpened and tempered."

       *       *       *       *       *

Braun stopped and flung himself at the drink. He seemed to need it. But
he was under control again, almost too much under control.

"We were way out--somewhere," he continued. "About as far as the others
ever got. You can't express it in miles or in time, because neither of
them have the right meaning. Not out there."

He stopped again. His eyes seemed to be staring beyond the outer
limits of darkness, beyond the mystical barrier of the speed of light
itself....

"The ship came out of warp automatically. Robot machinery was set for
that, to bring us out at intervals--though nobody could be sure just
how it would function. Ordinary time-intervals do not exist, and time
itself is a random factor--out there. They tell me we were gone more
than five years, here. For us, it was weeks. Most of the time we were
in suspended animation, of course, with automatic controls to handle
the ship and rouse one or more of us at intervals. Usually the ship was
out of the warp and stopped when we were awakened. Twice, both in the
early stages, it was not like that.

"Those times we were awake and in motion together. It was weird. Space
was like black, transparent cellophane, wrinkled and bunched together
with the ship leaping from one wrinkle to another. We could not see it,
but that was the way we imagined it. We could see, though.

"Stars thinned out and drew together. Stars, like luminous lice
crawling on the black body of eternity...."

       *       *       *       *       *

... Velocity and acceleration needles met in the center of the gauge.
No change in the relation of the ship to anything was apparent, and
none would be. Out of the warp, the ship hung, unmoving, in a vastness
of dark. Even the galaxies showed but faintly in the visiplates.
Destination was the spiral M31 in Andromeda, but the rest of Andromeda
lay far behind, and a faint smudge ahead seemed as far away as the home
galaxy, which was exactly the case.

_Venture IV_ had reached the halfway point, with three quarters of
a million light-years of loneliness in either direction. Poets and
writers have called it the point of no return, when a ship has reached
a point in its voyage where the distance back is as far as that still
ahead.

"Well, this is it," said Charters wearily. "We'll have to decide now
whether to go back ... or, if we think we can make it, push on ahead."

Charters was captain pro tem, though, on a technical ship, space
formalities and titles were phantoms.

Braun was unimpressed. "All right, it's the raw end of nowhere. And
we're here. What does it prove?"

Charters gave him a friendly slap.

"It proves one thing. That we can make it--next time. We could have
made it this time if we'd known what to expect. We'll go back with our
report, and the next ship will get there. And make it back to tell
about it. We could get there, this time--but not back. Sure, we're all
disappointed. But don't take it so hard. We haven't really failed.
We've made it easier to get the job done. Next time."

"Yes," agreed Braun bitterly. "The job will be done. But not by us.
We'll be too old before another ship is ready. And by the time the
analysts are through with this one, it will be junk. Just like us."

Charters laughed.

The two were alone in the control room. The other techs, for once all
awake at the same time, were busily checking their instruments, each in
his own department.

Braun was suffering from reaction. In an emergency, he could function
superbly. But with nothing to do, he brooded.

It was definitely the raw end of nowhere, though the instruments
and record tapes called it by a variety of mathematical equations.
According to the figures, the _Venture IV_ had made an interesting
voyage, turning itself completely inside out several times at
irregular intervals, smashing all existing speed and distance records
and extending the tenuous boundaries of man's interstellar and
intergalactic survey by a quarter million light-years. Other ships
might have gone further, but if they had, no one knew about it. They
had vanished into some limbo of space--

       *       *       *       *       *

Mass proximity alarms blared through the corridors and cubicles of the
_Venture IV_.

Nerves, already tensed, vibrated like thin glass, ready to disintegrate
from resonance.

There should have been no mass anywhere near. Not even a grain of
cosmic dust.

Blackness stretched in all directions, relieved only by the distant,
dimly glowing smudges of galaxies. Assembled in the control room,
_Venture IV's_ company discussed the mystery. No conclusion was
possible. Whatever was affecting the mass detectors lay dead ahead,
still out of vision range, and not even showing in the telescopic
relays.

By vote, it was decided to investigate. The _Venture IV_ operated on
democratic principles. Responsibility like risk was shared equally, and
"Captain" Charters had one vote.

Atomic jets, still useful for short range runs and for close
maneuvering, nudged the ship gently into motion, which is a relative
thing in deep space. In this case, relative to--

What?...

By instrument only, the _Venture IV_ groped blindly toward the unknown
object. By instrument only was it possible to gauge the approach.
Proximity needles wavered wildly, then settled down to indicate swiftly
diminishing distance, as if the alien object were matching velocity
with the _Venture IV_ on a collision course.

At such speeds, collision was possible. Charters began to worry
silently. Dubiously he eyed his crew, picked men, all volunteers eager
to challenge the unknown. But the unknown was still unknown, and
responding almost too eagerly.

"Could it be another spaceship?" asked Braun, voicing the thought in
every mind.

Charters just looked at him. "From--_there_?"

"From anywhere?" Braun persisted. "Who knows about curves or orbits out
here?"

Topping, the astrophysicist, smiled grimly. "Who knows about anything
here? It wasn't till the mid-Twentieth Century that we even knew M31
was as big as our own galaxy and twice as far away as had been thought.
Or guessed at the truth behind the Doppler shift."

"But a spaceship ... out here!" scoffed Charters.

Topping shrugged. "It could be. It could even be one of ours. From the
future, perhaps. We've done some weird doubling about in the space-time
continuum, remember."

"It could be anything, then," said Braun.

"Anything," echoed Topping.

"Start deceleration," ordered Charters, concerned with the more
practical aspects of a possible encounter in alien space. "Swing the
controls over to manual. I'll feel better about the ship if it comes
to dodging a collision. You have the practical piloting experience,
Braun. Take over."

Grinning, Braun seated himself at the manual keyboard and started
pressing studs. Lights blinked off and on in patterns on the screen at
vision level. He switched over to the visiplates mounted on the blunt
bow. A sector of blackness dead ahead was projected onto the screen.

There was nothing to see. Light in interstellar space is too feeble to
reveal anything not self luminous.

"Try a radilume beam," suggested Charters.

       *       *       *       *       *

The screen flickered, then resumed its blackness. With no dust, no
anything, to reflect light back to the ship, the beam lost itself in
the immensity.

Braun worked with the studs.

"We're slowing," he announced. "Now what?"

"Try a dead stop, but be ready to move out fast in case the alien
continues a collision course."

Braun nodded. In the artificial gravity field, no effect of
deceleration was perceptible. The ship slowed and stopped as dead as a
ship stops with no reference point to anything. What actually happened
was a delicate balancing upon a number of mathematical equations,
themselves unstable.

Mass proximity needles, showing the expected increase by squares,
indicated that the stranger also had come to a full stop by matching
exactly at zero. It was an interesting fact that so far from home the
familiar laws of gravity seemed to hold their familiar relations. More
interesting was the fact that the alien object or ship had stopped.

"See anything?" asked Charters.

"Not a thing," admitted Topping.

"How about the telescopes?"

McClure, the astrogator, reported then. Under the circumstances, his
voice sounded curiously matter of fact.

"A faint point of light. Not enough disk to tell much of anything about
it. We'll try with--"

"Can't be more than a mile away, I'd guess," said Braun. "What do we do
now? Just sit here and wait?"

Topping grunted. "Reminds me of a pair of strange dogs meeting away
from home and sniffing at each other with mutual curiosity and
mistrust."

"That's about the way it would be," Charters agreed weakly. "If that is
an alien ship out there, what else could we do?"

"We could try for contact. Communicate with them, somehow."

"Morse code?" asked Braun bitterly.

"There were humans in other parts of our own galaxy. Some of them
intelligent and highly civilized. We set up communications with them."

"There was a common basis with them," argued Braun. "And we found some
non-human intelligent races. Communications didn't do so well with
them, and the _Venture IV_ is no warship. We came here to windowshop,
not to buy, and not to take over anything by force. We're not equipped
for a row."

Charters broke in. "Topping is right. We'll try to set up
communication. With a modulated light beam."

"Go ahead and try," said Braun. "I'll stand by, just in case of
trouble. And when your idea fails, we can start talking sense."

Charters and Topping left him at the controls and joined Tal Roberts in
the communications office. Braun waited.

When they returned, he could tell by the faces that their plan had
fallen through.

"Struck a snag?" he asked amiably.

Charters' smile was weak. "We tried two messages. After a short wait,
they repeated them. You might say we've established communications. But
we're not getting anywhere."

"The same messages? Nothing else?"

"Nothing."

"Maybe they have no imagination. I have an idea if you're ready to
listen."

Charters nodded. "Go ahead ... if it's nothing that will endanger the
ship."

"The ship isn't involved. We have two space-lifeboats--though I can't
figure where we'd escape to if anything went sour out here. I'll take
one and slip away from the ship. With luck, I can sneak up on our
friends. Without lights. Keep your beam turned on, aimed right at the
alien. I'll stay out of the beam, but it should give enough light to
see by. If the thing looks like a real spaceship, and there's a chance
the occupants are human, I'll try to make actual contact. If not, I'll
scurry on back. How about it?"

"It could be dangerous. If anything happens--"

"You won't be any worse off. Probably, if it's another ship, the people
are just as scared and curious as we are. As the show stands, you don't
even dare try to run for it. I'm expendable."

"That's a matter of opinion. I won't rule on this, Braun. We'll call
the gang together and decide by vote."

       *       *       *       *       *

Half an hour later, the lifeboat was ready. Serviced with air, food
and water for an indefinite time, the tiny craft lay in its cradle.

"Keep a light in the window for me," said Braun.

He climbed aboard through the miniature airlock, which closed behind
him. Solenoid magnets conveyed the lifeboat through chutes into the
valve of the main airlock. Doors opened and closed with automatic
finality. Air hissed back into the ship as pumps emptied the valve.
With pressure equalized, the outer door opened into space.

Braun eased his tiny craft free, then turned and ran forward alongside
the _Venture IV_. From outside, the explorer ship seemed tremendous.
It was a small world in itself, complete, self-sustaining. But
mass-conversion was necessary to power the velocities far beyond the
speed of light, and already the voyage had eaten away too much of the
ship's mass.

A phantom glow hovered about the forward compartments as if the
metallic shell caught and reflected faint light from a distant source.
Braun wondered about that subconsciously, but in the midst of so many
wonders, one more mystery meant little.

There was no light beam to be seen. His instruments found a course
parallel to the invisible beam and followed it for him, with the robot
pilot in charge.

But for the ship dwindling behind him, the vault of space seemed empty.
In the blackness ahead, though he could not see it, was a single small
luminous speck. Behind him, the light of the ship diminished slowly to
infinity. It vanished. Braun was alone with his mission.

With no visible reference point, Braun's senses became unreliable.
Unlighted, the lifeboat seemed a mote of darkness lost in the greater
immensities. Even on the brink of the last unknown, the man grew
restless and depressed. With nothing to see, nothing to occupy the
senses of his brain, he was bored.

Braun groped blindly and gave himself the luxury of a cigarette. While
it lasted, the red glow of the cigarette's coal gave comfort to his
loneliness. It gave him something on which to concentrate.

There was no up, no down, no sideways, only ahead and behind, with
invisible dots of light to identify each. He felt oddly trapped, at
the mercy of automatic instruments. Curious and unpleasant illusions
crowded upon him.

For a time, he thought that all matter had vanished from the universe,
that only he and his lifeboat existed in all the great void. Later,
he thought that light itself had vanished. Telescopically, in any
direction, he could have found light, but to his unaided eyes all
darkness was the same. Then came the weirder illusions of other senses,
that his course followed no straight line or sane curves, but moved
endlessly upon some infinite spiral.

Time passed, and his eyes grew so accustomed to darkness that they
did not see the light when it appeared. Ahead, just a faint point,
steady, steel-hard, unwinking, it emerged from the blackness. Slowly it
increased in radiance rather than in size. Then at last it was a disk,
like a beacon set out to guide him in.

There was a beam, invisible with nothing to reflect its tight radiance
or diffuse it. But as before, when leaving his own ship, he avoided the
beam.

Cruising closer, Braun began to make out details.

It was a ship, no doubt about that. A phantom glow hovered about its
forward compartments as if the metallic shell caught and reflected
faint light from a distant source. It was a ship, all right. A ship
painfully like the _Venture IV_. A philosopher might have meditated
upon parallel evolutions, but Braun was too deeply shocked for delvings
into the deeper relations between man and his environments.

       *       *       *       *       *

The alien ship was identical. Braun satisfied himself of that by
circling, studying every aspect of the stranger. There was the same
indefinable quality which stamped it as man-made.

Almost hysterical with his discovery, Braun nerved himself to switch
off the automatic pilot and take over manual controls. Then he eased
in quickly beside an air lock which might have been the same one he
had left. Magnetic grapnels reached out from the lifeboat, caught and
dragged the lesser mass to the greater. At the controls, Braun guided
his tiny craft to the airlock valve, and the outer doors slid shut and
locked hermetically behind him.

Some kind of atmosphere would be hissing into the valve now, building
up pressure. It had to work like that.

Almost beside himself, Braun crawled into a spacesuit, then settled
back to wait impatiently.

Light flooded the valve as the inner doors slid smoothly open. Braun
made routine tests, then opened his cockleshell lifeboat hatch. Blinded
by light, he climbed out. On rubbery legs, encased in the bulging suit
of space armor, he walked to the gaping doorway and entered the alien
ship.

If a trap, it was a good one.

Braun staggered backward. As his eyes became accustomed to the light,
he stared. Disbelief in his senses and doubt of his sanity showed on
his face.

Opening the vent in his space helmet, he took a deep breath. Then he
stared curiously at--

Charters and Topping.

"You weren't gone long," observed Charters. The pair studied Braun,
their expressions puzzled.

"I guess I didn't get very far," admitted Braun uneasily. "Am I crazy
or is it everything else?"

"That's anyone's guess," said Topping. "What happened?"

"I'm not sure I know."

They waited for explanations while Braun took a stiff slug of coffee
laced with brandy.

"Somehow I must have got turned around," admitted Braun ruefully. "I
can understand that, but the lifeboat was set on automatic pilot. I
thought I came straight across, and with the robot pilot I should have.
What do you think happened?"

Topping was sober. "There are several possible explanations. I don't
like any of them. Maybe there's a flaw in space here. It could act like
a mirror, reflecting back our own mass and the beam of our own light.
Who knows? There may not even be an alien ship out there."

"But there's nothing material out there," objected Braun. "I was there,
and our instruments would show anything above the size of a speck of
dust. For that matter, we can see the thing in our telescopes, and
there's nothing we know that can distort the gravity-effect of mass let
alone turn it around like light reflected from a mirror. Who ever heard
of--"

"Who ever heard of nine men sealed in an oversized can and set down
halfway between home galaxy and M31?" reproved Topping. "Light and
gravity may not be functions only of our space-time continuum but of
others adjacent too and even overlapping ours. We know very little
about the nature of either, and some of our unexplained phenomena may
be the result of actions and reactions outside our continuum."

"That's getting too deep for me," said Braun. "I'm willing to try
again ... if only to prove I didn't funk out the first time. And this
time I'll go across with the lights blazing. I want you to use radar
and visual scanners on me all the way."

Charters shook his head. "We're up against something we don't
understand. I'm not sure I should permit--"

"What's the harm?" pleaded Braun. "I came through without a scratch
before. The worst that can happen is a repeat of the same farce.
Besides, I've just had a brainstorm. Suppose this is not the same
ship I left. Suppose there really are two ships exactly alike, even
to the people on board. Suppose that there are two civilizations that
developed identically--"

"Maybe you'd better go," laughed Charters. "If you keep on in that
vein, you'll give us all nightmares."

Braun's second try followed the same routine as the first. The
difference was in Braun himself. Before, he had been mildly excited,
calm but overstrained, expecting almost anything. There was a grimness
about his second venture. He felt moody and more depressed than before.
This time, there was no boredom.

Before leaving, he took a good look around, fixing the faces of his
companions into his memory, engraving the ship and endless details of
its structure and decoration into his brain. He felt as if he were
leaving all of it behind him forever.

The worst that can happen, he thought, is the same thing.

He was wrong about that....

       *       *       *       *       *

Approaching the alien ship, he braced himself. There was the light.
Then the ship, with its metallic shimmer of reflected light dimmed by
distance.

Again he circled, studying the contours of the immense fabrication.
He remembered an old French proverb about the more a thing changes the
more it remains the same. The ship was the same. It was the _Venture
IV_. He would stake his life and his sanity on it.

No matter. In a way he was relieved. Once inside the ship, he would let
the experts explain it to him. At least he had tried. Nobody could say
this time that he funked the job. They would have had the scanners on
him all the way. And this time he knew--somehow--that he had not turned
around from any confusion. Also, with the lights on, he had watched
the automatic pilot. There had been no trick turns. He had it on the
flight-record tapes.

If the lifeboat had returned to its point of departure, the only
possible explanation was that a space-warp or a flaw in the space-time
continuum had turned it inside out.

"End of the line," Braun murmured contentedly. "End of the line again."

Skilfully he maneuvered the lifeboat up to the bulk of the _Venture
IV_. He grappled it to the airlock valve and slipped it inside on the
skids.

The outer doors closed. This time he was so sure of where he was that
he did not bother with the spacesuit. He waited till the inner doors
opened to matched pressures, then scuttled out of the lifeboat. The
air was breathable, the usual hydroponic cycle stuff, just what he was
used to. It smelled oddly of pumps as it always does, pump-packing and
growing things. Air in the lifeboat had been too rich in ozone, and
Braun was giddy with the sharp tang of it.

Braun strode confidently into the ship.

No one was around to greet him. It was a gag they had worked up, he
figured. All right, he'd play along.

Through the ship he went, calling out names. Echoes rang hollowly in
the vast interior, but they were the only answer. He kept wandering
and calling, wandering and crying out. Finally, he was screaming
hysterically.

It was a long time before the fact got through solidly to him. He was
alone on the ship.

So far as he could tell, it was the _Venture IV_. Everything about the
ship was the same. It was _his_ ship. Wherever he had been, he was
back on _his_ ship. He had to keep on assuring himself of that. It
was either the _Venture IV_ ... or an exact duplicate. But the other
duplicate had duplicated the people, too.

"Where is everybody?" he screamed.

He went on screaming for a long time. A very long time....

       *       *       *       *       *

Smoke curled up from Braun's cigarette to join the dense layers near
the bar's ceiling. Light shone through the blued stratifications in
blurred blobs as through fog.

"That's the story," said Braun huskily.

"Not all of it," somebody murmured.

"Not quite. The ship was mostly automatic. I knew then why I had been
picked. As I said, in an emergency, I could handle any job or even all
jobs, for as long as necessary. We had all the flight tapes from the
long voyage out. Mainly it was a job for the computers. You couldn't
just run the tapes through backward because nothing ever stands quite
still in the universe. All I know is that we did it, the ship and I.
The _Venture IV_ is the real hero, I guess. It brought me back."

"What about the others?" somebody persisted.

"I don't know," Braun answered irritably. "All I know is what I've told
you. What happened to me. About the rest of the bunch, even the experts
are still guessing. There are several theories. There were things about
the ship. Odd differences. Nothing I could catch, but the experts found
curiosities. They think I was tricked, that it's not really the same
ship, but a clever and almost miraculous duplicate."

"But why, and how?"

Braun laughed bitterly. "Your guess is as good as anybody's. Mine
is--that I wasn't wanted. The rest of the crew were all specialists,
trained technicians, each one the best in his field. If _somebody_ out
there wanted some samples of the best brains in the human race, he
really got the top quality. They were all educated to the hilt, trained
for a particular job. Maybe they were picked because they were ready
for something else. They had the entrance qualifications. I hadn't.
That may not be the only explanation. It's probably the best one."

Braun poured himself another drink and drank it. His eyes stared
blankly, as if the essential part of him was back out on the raw
frontiers of the dark unknown.

Somebody dragged him back to the bar with a final question.

"But surely you must have some ideas of your own. What do you think
happened to the others?"

Braun smiled soberly. His voice was tired, and it sounded as empty as
those black spaces where no sun ever shines.

"What I think doesn't matter. There may be another world out
there ... or something in hyperspace. That may be a point of contact,
or it may be a barrier against all man's dreams of further expansion
and exploration into the unknown. You've asked what I think happened to
the others, and it's a good question. People are going to keep asking
me that. I don't know the true answer. Maybe I'll never know--"

Braun hesitated, glanced round him at the ring of strained and
questioning faces. He saw the disbelief registered on them--the thinly
veiled anger that seemed to shout out at him _why don't you tell us
what really happened! Tell us the truth!_

Braun sighed resignedly. It was always the same. It would always be the
same. Wherever he went. And he would have to keep moving ... alone,
apart from other men.

He walked past the silent questioning faces and through the door. And
down the street to the next bar....



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Voyage of Vanishing Men" ***

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