The starmen

by Leigh Brackett

The wailing shriek rose to a crescendo, and then it died. Earth was gone. They had stepped away from it. Even its sky was behind them. A weight like to the weight of mountains lay on Trehearne, and he was horribly afraid.

He waited for the pressure to ease. His temples were bursting, it was an agony to breathe, and he thought, It can't go on like this, it's got to let up! But it did not. There was a change in the pitch of the motor vibration. He listened to it climb, higher and higher, until it slipped over the threshhold of hearing, and as it climbed, the pressure grew. The bones of his chest crushed in upon his lungs. Everything around him began to waver and grow vague, to recede slowly into a reddish twilight.

And still the pressure grew.

Something was happening to him. Something unearthly and strange. He was a flier, a test-pilot. He had known pressure before. He had taken all the gravs a power-diving plane could bear and he had never come near blacking out. But this was different. He felt it in the fibres, the very atoms of his being. This was velocity beside which the velocities of the fastest jets was as nothing. This was the speed of interstellar flight. And he could feel it tearing at the separate cells of his flesh, riving them apart, rending the tissues of physical existence. A difference, a condition of the flesh. With us there is no doubt, but you....

Anguish became terror, terror turned into blind panic. His body was shredding apart, dissolving toward a tattered ruin, a heap of bloody rags. This body he had been so proud of, this star-born self that was only a mockery, a sham. The mutation hadn't bred true. He was going to die, to cease utterly from being. He was....

Far, far away, a voice, Shairn's voice, crying, "I've killed him. Poor Michael, I didn't mean for him to die!"

Poor Michael. A mongrel, a walking deceit. Proud Michael, who thought he was so damned good, and wasn't anything. Idiot Michael, who had run after a witch. And she hadn't meant for him to die. She hadn't really been that angry because he had treated her like an equal—not nicely, perhaps, but like an equal, which he wasn't. That was kind of her, not really to want him killed. He began to be able to see her face again. He wasn't sure whether it was true sight, or only the memory of how she had looked before he began to die. But he could see her, pale, distorted. He was glad he could see her. She was sitting in front of him, and she wasn't far away. Somehow, pressure or no pressure, he was going to get to her. He was going to put his hands around her white throat, and then they could forget about starflight together, and it wouldn't matter that he was a mongrel and she was not. He began to fight against the pressure.

He wanted so little. Only to get up, to move the short distance and lock his fingers at the back of her neck, with his two thumbs lying over the great pulses. So little. He was filled with a raging determination to have it. He fought. He had nothing to fight with but will-power and the instinctive desire of the organism to claw onto life as long as there was a flicker of it left. He wanted to get up, and he fought, an inner struggle without sound or motion, a blind battle to regain control of his own flesh. His face contorted, like the face of a man who lifts something far too heavy, and the sweat ran on it. Slowly, slowly, his hands moved on the chair arms, contracted, became fists. The muscles of his arms tightened, and then the great muscles of the chest and belly, and they labored, and the breath came painfully into his lungs—came, and went, and came again, and his flagging heart stumbled, steadied, and began to beat more evenly. The red mist that wrapped him cleared away a bit and he could see Shairn more distinctly. She was staring at him. Her mouth and eyes were wide open, ludicrous, startled. Then Edri's head came between them and blotted her out, and he was shouting, but the blood was pounding so loud in Trehearne's ears that he could not hear what he said. He raised a hand and tried to thrust Edri away. He did not want to lose sight of Shairn. There was a tremendous exaltation on him. He was winning. He was going to get up and do the thing he wanted to do. The sinews coiled and tensed along his thighs. The pressure didn't hurt so much, and the terrible vibrations of speed were not tearing at him quite so hard. He leaned forward a little, breathing in deep harsh gasps, and his body strained and tightened....

"He's going to live, he's made it. Michael...."

Shairn's voice, thin and shrill through the tumult in his ears. For a moment the meaning didn't penetrate. Then slowly it dawned on him what she had said. And then, more slowly still, he realized that it was true. He could feel the life flowing back into him. He was getting the hang of it now, a simple matter of tensing the muscles in a certain way, and the agony of the vibration lessened, the atoms of his body stopped their ghastly dissolution. It was only a matter of strength—not the kind that can move great weights, but a more subtle kind, a tensile strength that knit the fabric of the flesh together and made it impervious as steel. In an infantile way he had been using it for years without knowing it, in his testing of fast planes. That was why he had never blacked out, why he had never been tortured as other men were by the spectre of inertia waiting for them at the end of a dive. Now he had found at last the purpose his body was made for. He forgot about Shairn. She didn't matter any more. He had won, he was alive, he was going to live, and he was not a sham nor a mockery, he was not even a mongrel. The mutation had bred true. His vision was clearing fast. He raised his head and looked around, and they were all staring at him, the Vardda, the Starmen, who had been so sure he was going to die. They were talking back and forth in excited voices, they were getting up and coming toward him, and Edri was pounding him on the shoulder. He thrust them all away and stood up.