the Remnant group when we make contact.”
“Very well, Captain,” she said. She wore a pretty smile when she said that. I thought how it was or seemed un-right that she, the smallest and most delicate of the crew, must perform the most difficult duties and engage the greatest risks. After all the millions of light years we had traversed through underspace, Seeker must calibrate her last tasks in terms of English yards, feet, inches and fractions of inches. It is a little like, I thought, leaping from an immensely tall tower and coming to rest lightly upon a grain of sand. While she was doing so, distractions would be taking place violently.
If any of us others could have done it for her, we would so, but we lacked the telepathic talents that are hers. We each possessed rudimentary telepathic ability, as Ship says that almost every intelligence must own, and Ship is able to link us tenuously with Seeker when necessary, but each faint contact is not voluptuously profitable. None could take Seeker’s place, but we would be aiding in all possible ways, and eagerly too.
I read through the long list of protocols and drills that Ship inscribed on my screens and during the next eight waking periods, I went through them with the crew until it would no longer help to do so.
Thereafter we rested and played games among us, though Seeker and Ship kept alert.
Then on the next watch, Seeker reported that she detected mental activity nothing like that of the Old Ones. It was a small group hiding away, she said, three or four of them. Of three she was certain, but the fourth was unclear. One of the three was a telepath, sending strange, nearly random signaling, though of course not directed at Seeker. “This telepath is un-normal of mind,” she said. She wrinkled her brow as she bent to her screens and scopes and auditories. Her console and all its instruments were nervily active, blinking and trilling, and her hands fluttered over them like white ribbons wafting in strong air convection.
“Is the Terran telepath deranged?” I asked.
“I do not know,” Seeker said, and Doctor said, “Not exactly deranged.” She was busy at her instruments also. Her console was collecting medical information from Seeker’s instruments and filtering for Doctor.
“What then?” I asked.
She hesitated then said, “I believe the Terran term is
“Autistic?” I said.
She paused again, listening, and then repeated what Ship told her screen: “
“Profound, imprisoning subjectivity sounds like derangement,” I said. “Is this autist able to travel distances?”
She studied for a while and then replied. “I think so, yes. But it will be difficult for her.”
“The telepath is female?”
“Yes, a she.”
“Being autistic, does she know she is telepathic?” I asked Seeker.
She studied. “We are too far. I cannot read. She may be mind-linked to a slave organism.”
“That does not bode good,” I said.
“We need to be nearer.” Her face wrinkled as she concentrated and I recalled her description of the difficulties of receiving such mental fields or auras and the messaging therein. “It is like trying to feel a photon with a fingertip,” she said. We marveled at that notion, Doctor and I. Navigator only shook his head impatiently. I think that he is sometimes a little envious of Seeker’s abilities. It is good he keeps good temper, for if we quarreled and made spats, our concentration would suffer harm.
In the ruins of the old spaceship libraries there were many descriptions of Terra’s moon. The scientific accounts put its orbital revolution at 271/3 days at a distance of 384,403 kilometers from the planet. Its bright albedo was remarked and attributed to its surface of glassy crystalline soil. There was a great amount of similar minutiae, important to Terrans because a moon base was in process of construction when the Old Ones came again. This satellite inspired poets to write of it incessantly, often in terms not faithful to astronomical fact. They frequently spoke of it in terms of silver, as “striding the night in silver shoon” or “gifting its silver smile to the still waters.”
If there were any poets upon the planet still composing, they spoke no more of a “silver orb.” The Old Ones had sculpted the satellite into a five-pointed construction, angry red-orange in color, mottled with pyramidal protrusions disposed in groups of five, a geometry vaguely suggesting the shapes of the crania of the Old Ones. The rubble from this immense project was still falling upon Terra in shower after shower of meteors and meteorites. This was one reason Ship was cloaked in the guise of a meteor. So many of such bodies were striking Terran atmosphere, it had been thought that we might be undistinguished amid the number of them.
On such frail hopes and forlorn details our enterprise depended.
I could not always keep my apprehensions at bay. The four of us, with no useful experience to rely on, dropping through its sun-system to an obscure planet, no more than a speck on the outer shoals of this galaxy, our vessel disguised and ridged and pocked as if by collisions, a mote thousands of times smaller than the watery world toward which we drifted. What madness had come upon the Great Ones to entrust us with so important a mission?
Then it came to me that our ignorance and inexperience were the factors that had determined the choice. We were a more expendable crew than most of the other search teams. Those who had survived encounters and rescued Remnant groups would be sent to more prominent fronts to undertake larger and more urgent missions. Our little family was dispatched to an odd little corner of the conflict. If the Old Ones exterminated us, the loss would be relatively unimportant — unless we let slip, through carelessness or under stress, information that might help tease out the locations of important Alliance posts.
Dreadful but necessary measures had been installed to prevent that from happening.
We kept gazing at the ugly orange moon-sculpture as it filled twelve of our visiscreens. I thought that it seemed to pulse its coloration, the orange brightening and darkening at irregular intervals, but set the impression aside as an illusions born of tensed nerves.
“Navigator,” I said, “how fare we?”
He glanced at his instruments and sighed. “Well enough, I think, though there are some slight anomalies I cannot account for. Distances seem to change irrespective of our velocity.”
“Seeker?”
“I think the Starheads — I mean, the Old Ones — may be distressing the local space-weave,” she said. “They are probably constructing some of those colossal engines we were taught about. The energies exchanged are so enormous they may twist space-time here.”
Navigator said this might account for his observations.
Then Seeker asked us to fall quiet. “I may be feeling something,” she said. “Silence will help me to concentrate. I am picking up fearful emotions. At least, I think perhaps.”
“The crew will silence,” I said.
Seeker had spoken before of the fear the fugitives on Terra must be enduring and I understood that these would be stark and continuous, but I wondered how they would feel if they knew the extent of the Old Ones’ desecrations. World on world, across all the cosmos, were crumbled to rubble or blown away to radioactive cloud, millions of nations, tribes, and civilizations were mangled to bloody ruin, the grandest achievements of art, science, religion, and philosophy had gone dark like lights turned off on a space cruiser.
The Terrans had known something of the Old Ones before this time. They had learned, but they had forgotten — almost purposefully, it seemed. In one of the relic spaceship libraries was a long document concerning something called Miskatonic Expedition 1935. This exploration project had discovered in land- mass Australia “certain traces” the Old Ones had left “in rocks even then laid down a thousand million years. laid down before the true life of [Terra] had existed at all.” The Terrans, according to this history, knew about the struggles of the Old Ones against the “spawn” of Cthulhu and the abominable Mi-Go and about some of the interstellar subjugations and massacres. These things they knew, but when the ancient evils rose again from the sea or “seeped down” from the stars, they were not prepared.
Their lack of realization had been pointedly described by their best historian of Cthulhu and the Old Ones and Great Ones. He spoke candidly of their failure, imputing it to “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” He drew a dark, disheartening view of his species: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in a black
