Author: Paul W. Fairman

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made two more charges on the ship, then drew back screaming in rage from a snapped tooth. And all around us, there in the ship, the sparkling fog glittered and tried to talk.

Two hours. The beast still rages in the void outside our ship.

ane is dead. She was horribly mangled. I put her in her bunk and laid a blanket over her and now the blanket is soaked in her blood.

No one could have helped her. It happened in the lounge. She was in there alone. I was in the control room. I don't know where the rest were.

I was working uselessly with the controls when I heard a terrible scream mixed with a hideous snarling. I ran into the companionway and stared toward the lounge. Murdo appeared from somewhere and we were shouldering each other on the companion ladder. Murdo fell heavily. Then we were both looking into the lounge.

It was too late to help Jane. We saw her there, still and bloody. A shiny black leopard was crouching gory-mouthed over her body with its paws on her breast. It's eyes were black magnets, holding mine.

I said, "Get a gun," trying to speak without moving my lips.

"But—"

"Damn you—get a gun!"

Murdo staggered away. It seemed a year before he came back with a Hinzie Special .442. The leopard was tight, ready to spring. I didn't dare move a muscle. I said, "Over my shoulder. Get him. Don't miss."

That last was a little silly. How could a man miss with a Hinzie at ten feet? Murdo fired and tore the leopard's head off. It was down already so it didn't move. It sat there headless, its tail twitching slightly. Then it was still.

I didn't hesitate this time. I said, "Come on. We've got to get this out of here before the others show."

We put the dead leopard into the forward storage bunker. Then I picked up poor Jane and carried her to her room. Murdo helped me up the ladder. The others were in the companionway and they pressed back in horror to let me pass. For the first time since we'd started, Keebler was sober. Ashen, shaking, stone sober. He broke; screamed and ran for his bottle, the world of reality too terrible for him to bear.

There was no huddle, no conference, no meeting of the minds. Everyone else went to the galley and sat staring into space; stared at the dancing little sparkles in the air.

I went to my cabin.

When confronted by a reality no matter how crazy and improbable, a man must not turn from it. He can not carry the mangled body of a woman in his arms and then say to himself: This isn't real because it doesn't make sense. It does make sense—some kind of sense or it would not exist. A man must say rather: I don't understand this and maybe I never will but God gave me a brain and I must try. I can't sit back and deny reality. I must try to understand it. I cleared my mind and tried to rationalize the things around us.

Out in the darkness there was a terrible roaring and yammering. The thuds and bellows of violence. I went to the port.

There, in the light from the ship, the ice bear and the water buffalo were fighting. It was a terrible and magnificent thing but to me it was anticlimax; a sideshow of almost casual interest.

The ice bear outsized the water buff by too much to be in any danger, but the buff fought savagely and the ice bear had no easy time. The buff opened a long deep gash in the bear's throat when the bear missed a lunge and the Plutonian mammal fell back with a roar of pain and fury. They came together again and this time the bear got the buff in a hug and it was all over. The buff's spine broke and the bear bent the body double, then tore it to pieces. I wondered if the others were watching.

I went back to pacing; back to my thinking.

I have been thinking, thinking, thinking; wracking my brain. And of one thing I am sure. Some invisible intelligence is trying to help me; trying to give me knowledge. The sparkling fog?

great and wonderful thing has happened.

And I know. Do you realize what that means? To know in a situation like this? And to be wonderfully and wildly happy? The knowledge was not all given me. There was a thought process of my own developing. The thing given me was the basic knowledge upon which to build. And proof of this knowledge. Absolute and indisputable proof.

The sparkling fog is mind stuff.

I will not defend that statement. I will not rationalize it. But I will seek explanations; consider possibilities.

Known: This sparkling fog through which we drift is intelligent matter; the stuff of thoughts; the basic material from which consciousness springs. It is consciousness itself.

Supposed: It is probably electronuclear in composition, and appears to be completely innocent. By that I mean it has no intention to harm, perhaps because it does not understand the difference between good and evil, harm and help, pain and pleasure.

It has only one urge; the basic urge of all creation. To evolve, to develop. As the tree has but one basic urge—to grow and greaten; the flower but one desire—to bloom, to improve; to assert itself through evolution and become better.

Perhaps—and who can successfully deny it?—this great space cloud could be a storage place of the Creator Himself; a storage place for mind stuff. When an infant or an animal or a plant is touched with the magic thing called life—where does that magic come from? Is it created at the very moment or does it come somehow from a source-pile? Is this cloud a source-pile of life itself? No one can say. But I think I've hit on a limitation of this mind stuff. I'm going to try an experiment and pray to God it works.

I'm going to find Murdo and knock him unconscious.

I have solved the mind-stuff. What just happened is the last bit of proof I need. I went to the galley. Murdo had wandered away. I found him in the lounge. I stepped casually in front of him, set myself, and drove a straight right to his jaw. He went down like a log.

I closed my eyes and counted to twenty praying to God to make me right in my belief—in the crazy theory I evolved. I opened my eyes and turned to the storage locker. I looked inside.

The dead leopard was gone.

I went to the port and looked out. The huge ice bear had been ravening insanely among the shreds of the water buffalo's body. As I watched both bear and buff began fading.

Before my eyes, they disappeared, evolved back into the stuff of the sparkling fog. I had proved my theory.

Now all the parts dropped into place. The mind stuff has only the ability and the urge to evolve—nothing else—no imagination. It can evolve only if given something to reproduce.

This it can get only from a human mind. It is able to see an image pictured in the human memory and reproduce it in a state of absolute reality.

Witness: Jane saw a tiger in the companionway. Clear in her memory was the image of the tiger she had shot at in India. The mind-stuff saw it and reproduced it in reality. The water buffalo came from my own mind. I killed one exactly like it a year ago. The ice bear was out of Murdo's memory as was the black leopard and the snake.

Witness: The three animals created inside the ship did not appear until the mind stuff from outside penetrated the hull and entered the ship. They were of normal size. But the animals created outside the ship were far out of proportion, the ice bear especially. Why? Because, I believe, the mind stuff is denser in the void. There it has more strength.

My defense against the mind stuff was formulated almost accidentally. I remembered the sequence of Jane's tiger. She saw it, entered my cabin, realized its significance, and fainted. I looked into the companionway and saw the tiger fading.

So I knocked out Murdo for final proof and got it. As soon as he lapsed into unconsciousness the recreations from his mind turned back into sparkling fog. Obviously, and a heaven-sent phenomenon it is—the mind stuff immediately loses its subject-image when the mind from which it came goes unconscious. The mind-stuff has no memory of its own and cannot hold its recreated image in the evolved form under conditions of unconsciousness. The answer now becomes simple.

I drugged Murdo before he regained consciousness. I drugged the other three by means of whisky and food. They have been unconscious for twelve hours. Nothing has happened. I shall keep them that way.

The mind-stuff is trying to complain to me. Almost petulantly; as a child. I sense it sharply. It does not understand the wrong it has done and feels it has been deprived of its right.

I have no time for the mind-stuff. I guard myself against it and ignore it. There are other things on my mind. Shall I go back if we ever escape from the sparkling fog? I don't know. I don't want to go back. I want to go on and on forever just like this. But the others cannot go on like this. It would be murder. I don't know.—I don't know.

I must keep awake. I use drugs. I must not sleep—not sleep.

We have cleared the fog. The instruments are working again. Again the stars glow. What shall I do. Melody....

ennedy looked up from his reading. "As I said,"—and he spoke severely—"you break off at an abrupt point. You did not complete the log."

Holloway's red eyes were glazed. "I had other things to do. I was tired of keeping a log."

Mason sought to draw Kennedy off his quarry. "There's an odd point," he said, looking at Holloway. "Only animals were recreated. Do you think the mind stuff was capable only of recreating animals?"

Holloway spoke in an exhausted monotone. "It took the clearest image from the strongest minds. Murdo thought mainly of hunting. He pondered on his more spectacular kills. Thus the mind-stuff used his images."

"I see."

Holloway seemed to sag—to shrink. He said, "The mind-stuff could recreate anything. It brought Melody back to me."

Kennedy sprang to his feet. "There is no reference in this log to—"

Mason turned on him. "Shut up, you fool!" He laid a gentle hand on Holloway's shoulder. "Tell us about it, old chap."

Holloway turned his burning eyes on the closed door to the next room. "She's in there. I wanted to get rid of you. I was afraid you would take her away from me. But it's no use. I can't hold my consciousness much longer. Then she will vanish."

Holloway tried weakly to rise from his chair. He called, "Melody—Melody baby!"

The door opened. A beautiful girl in a blue dressing gown came gracefully into the room. She walked straight to Holloway and took his tortured head into her soft hands. Her eyes pleaded with the men. "He suffers so. He will not sleep. I can't make him sleep. I—I don't understand."

Holloway's head dropped suddenly onto his chest. He slumped down in his chair. And as he did so, a change took place. The two men stood rooted, staring.

As Melody began to fade. Slowly, slowly, into a transparent image, into a mist, into a handful of sparkling fog.

Then she was gone.

Mason knelt by the bone-thin body in the chair. He made a quick examination and got wearily to his feet.

"Holloway is dead," he murmured. "Drugs of that nature would kill an elephant. I can't understand how he lived so long."

Kennedy blinked and seemed to come out of a trance. He frowned. "And the investigation hardly started."

Mason shook his head and looked pityingly at Kennedy. It was just no use with a man like him. Mason said. "There's one point entirely apparent without an investigation."

"What's that?"

Mason's voice was sharp and cold. "That our little playboy, for all his reputation of frivolity, was a better man than you and I put together. Does that register, Mr. Kennedy?"

Kennedy flared. "Now see here. I'm only doing my job!"

"Oh shut up," Mason said.

And strode out of the room.

THE END End of Project Gutenberg's The Beasts in the Void, by Paul W. Fairman

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