Starborne

Marcus is perhaps thirty meters away now. Still maintaining his grip on Giovanna’s wrist — Huw isn’t certain how much in command of herself she is just now, and he wants to keep the group together — Huw trots over the flat dusty ground toward him, half dragging Giovanna along at his side. After a moment she seems to get into the rhythm of it, coping with the slightly lessened gravity and all, and they start to move with some commonality of purpose. It takes them a minute or so to catch up with Marcus, who halts, wheeling around to face them like a trapped fox, and then lurches toward them, holding out both his hands to them in a gesture of desperate appeal.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” he begins to mutter, in a kind of whining sob. Invoking the archaic name, a name having no real meaning for him or any of them, but somehow bringing comfort. “I’m so afraid, Huw!”

“Are you, now, boy?” Huw asks. He takes the proffered hand and indicates to Giovanna that she should take the other one. And then the three of them are holding hands like children standing in a ring, staring at each other bewilderedly, while the year-captain in orbit high overhead continues to assail Huw’s ears with questions that Huw still is unable to answer. The rough sound of sobbing comes over the phones from Marcus. Giovanna is showing better self-control, but her face is still rigid with fright.

Huw checks his own internal weather. It’s still stormy. For as much time as he is in motion, taking charge of things and behaving like the strong, efficient leader that he is, he seems able to fight the panic away. But the moment he stops moving, it threatens to break through his defenses again.

Being close to the other two helps, a little. Each one now is aware that the disturbance is a general one, that all three of them are affected in the same basic way. So long as they stand here holding hands, some kind of current of reassurance is passing between them, providing a little extra measure of strength that can be used in resisting the sweeping waves of pure unmotivated fear that continue relentlessly to attack them.

“What’s it like for you?” Huw asks.

Marcus can’t seem to utter articulate speech. He makes a ghastly little stammering sound and trails off into silence. But Giovanna is in better shape, apparently. “It’s like everything I was ever afraid of when I was a girl, all rolled into one big horror. The nightmares that won’t stop even after they wake me up. The eye that opens in the wall and stares at me. The insects with huge snapping jaws coming out of the closet. The snakes at the bottom of my bed.”

“It started to hit you inside the drone?”

“As soon as we landed, yes. But it’s worse out here. A lot worse. Are you getting hit with the same stuff?”

“Yes,” Huw says distantly. “Pretty much the same.”

Pretty much, yes. Teeth itching, tingling, seemingly expanding until they fill his mouth. A throbbing in his groin, and not the good kind of throbbing. Jagged blocks of ice moving about in his belly. And always that steady pounding of dread, dread, dread. A relentless neural discharge activating the terror-synapses that he had not even known he owned.

No wonder there don’t seem to be any higher life-forms on this planet. Animal evolution has met its match here. Any nervous system complicated enough to operate the various homeostatic processes that are involved in upper-phylum life is too complicated to withstand this constant barrage of fear and trembling. No neural hookup more elaborate than those of bugs and worms can put up with it for long without giving way.

“What do you think it is?” Giovanna asks. “And what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know and I don’t know,” he tells her.

Then, addressing himself to the Wotan, he says, “We’re having a little problem down here. We’ve all come out of the probe ship and we find that we seem to be suffering from some sort of a collective psychological breakdown. No reason for it apparent. It’s just happening. Has been since the moment of touchdown. As though this place is—”

From Marcus, suddenly, comes a dismal retching sound.

“ — haunted in some way,” Huw finishes.

Marcus has pulled free of them and is clawing at the helmet of his suit. Before Huw can do anything, Marcus has his faceplate open and he is breathing the unfiltered air of this alien world, the first human being ever to do such a thing. He is, in fact, vomiting into the air of this alien world, which is why he has opened his faceplate in the first place. Huw watches helplessly as Marcus doubles over in the most violent attack of nausea Huw has ever seen. Marcus falls to his knees, quivering convulsively. Hugs his belly, spews up spurts of thin fluid in what seems like an endless racking process.