Today, I start a series of posts that will be continued on Sundays. In this series I will be “re-publishing” pulp science fiction short stories that have long since gone out of print. When possible I will seek out author’s and estates for permission.
Photo courtest of turbojoe on Flickr.
The Face of the Deep
By Fred Saberhagen, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, September, 1966.
part 1
After five minutes had gone by with no apparent change in his situation, Karlsen realized that he might be going to live for a while yet. And as soon as this happened, as soon as his mind dared open its eyes again, so to speak, he began to see the depths of space around him and what they held.
Not that there was much else for him to see, riding as he was in a crystalline bubble of a launch about twelve feet in diameter. The fortunes of war had dropped him here, halfway down the steepest gravitational hill in the known universe.
At the unseeable bottom of this hill lay a sun so massive that not a quantum of light could escape it with a visible wavelength. In less than a minute he and his raindrop of a boat had fallen here, some unmeasurable distance out of normal space, trying to escape an enemy which had remained in close pursuit. Karlesen was a religious man, and he had spent that falling minute in a prayer, achieving something like calm, considering himself already dead.
But after that minute, he was suddenly no longer falling. He seemed to have entered an orbit, an orbit that no man had ever traveled before, amid sights no eyes had ever seen.
He rode above a thunderstorm at war with a sunset — a ceaseless, soundless turmoil of fantastic clouds that filled half the sky as a nearby planet would. But this mas was immeasurably bigger than any planet, bigger in fact than most giant stars. Its core and its cause, held forever beyond human sight by its own power, was a hypermassive sun a billion times the weight of Sol.
The clouds were interstellar dust, swept up by the pull of the hypermass, drawn to the fall tumbling and churning into it. The clouds as they fell built up electrical static which was discharged in almost continuous lightning. Karlsen saw as blue-white the nearer flashes and those ahead of him as he rode. But most of the flashes, like most of the clouds, were far below him, and so most of his light was sullen-red, wearied by climbing just a section of this gravity-cliff. Karlsen’s little bubbleship had artificial gravity of its own and kept turning itself so its deck was down, so Karlesen saw the red light below him through the translucent deck, flaring up between his space-booted feet. He saw in the one massive chair which was fixed in the center of the bubble and which contained the boat’s controls and life-support machinery. Below the deck were one or two other opaque objects, one of these a small but powerful space-warping engine. All else around Karlsen was clear glass, holding in air, holding out radiation, but leaving his eyes and soul naked to the deeps of space around him.
He took a full breath now and tried his engine, tried to lift himself up out of here. As he had expected, nothing happened at full drive. He might as well have been working bicycle pedals.
