Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online Page B

scruffy. He’s just standing there staring at me, kind of sniffing the air.”
    “Janine!” I shouted into the radio. “We’re at the docks-which way from here?”
    Pause. Then, strangely, a kind of shocked giggle. “Just keep coming straight,” she said shakily. “Come on quick. You-you wouldn’t believe what he’s doing now!”
     
3 Wan in Love
     
     
    The trip to the outpost seemed longer than usual to Wan, because he was troubled in his mind. He missed the companionship of the Dead Men. He missed even more what he had never had. A female. The notion of Wan in love was a fantasy for him, but it was a fantasy he wanted to make real. So many of the books helped it along, Romeo and Juliet and Anna Karenina and the old romantic Chinese classics.
    What drove the fantasies out of his mind at last was the sight of the outpost as he drew near. The board lighted up to signal the beginning of docking maneuvers, the flow lines on the screen melted away, and the shape of the outpost snapped into vision. But it was not the same shape as always. There was a new ship in one of the docking hatches, and a strange jagged structure strapped to one side of the hull.
    What could such things mean? When the docking was complete Wan poked his head through the hatch and stared around, sniffing and listening.
    After a time he concluded that no one was near. He did not remove his books or other possessions from the ship. He resolved to stay ready to flee at a moment’s notice, but he decided to explore. Once before, long ago, some other person had been at the outpost, and he believed it had been a female. Tiny Jim had helped him identify the garment then. Perhaps he should ask Tiny Jim for advice now? Munching on a berryfruit, he handed himself easily along the rails toward the dreaming room, where the pleasure couch lay surrounded by the book machines.
    And stopped.
    Had that been a sound? A laugh, or a cry, from far away?
    He threw the berryfruit away and stood for a moment, all his senses tensely extended. The sound was not repeated. But there was something-a smell, very faint, quite pleasant, quite strange. It was not unlike the smell in the garment he had found, and carried around for many days until the last vestige of scent was gone from it and he put it back where it was found.
    Had that person come back?
    Wan began to shake. A person! It had been a dozen years since be had smelled or touched a person! And then only his parents. But it might not be a person, it could be something else. He launched himself toward the dock where that other person had been, craftily avoiding the main passages, hurling himself down narrower, less direct ways where he did not think any stranger was likely to go. Wan knew every inch of the outpost, at least as far within it as it was possible to travel without coming to the dead-end locked walls that he did not know how to open. It took him only a few minutes to reach the place where he had carefully rearranged the debris left by the outpost’s one visitor.
    Everything was there. But not, he saw, as he had left it. Some things bad been picked up and dropped again.
    Wan knew he had not done that. Apart from the discipline he had always imposed upon himself, of leaving the outpost exactly as he had found it, so that no one could ever know he was there, this time he had been especially careful to arrange the litter precisely as it had been left. Someone else was on the outpost.
    and he was many minutes away from his ship.
    Cautiously but quickly he returned to the docks on the other side, pausing at every intersection to look and smell and listen. He reached his ship and hovered at the hatch, indecisively. Run or explore?
    But the smell was stronger now, and irresistible.
    Step by step he ventured down one of the long, dead-end corridors, ready to retreat instantly.
    A voice! Whispering, almost inaudible. But it was there. He peered around a doorway, and his heart pounded. A person! Huddled against a