Frank Herbert - Escape Felicity

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Escape Felicity

Frank Herbert, 1966

'An escape-proof prison cannot be built,' he kept telling himself. His name was Roger Beirut, five feet

tall, one hundred and three pounds, crewcut black hair, a narrow face with a long nose and wide mouth

and space-bleached eyes that appeared to reflect rather than absorb what they saw.

Beirut knew his prison - the D-Service. He had got himself rooted down in the Service like a remittance

man half asleep in a hammock on some palm-shaded tropical beach, telling himself his luck would change

some day and he'd get out of there.

He didn't delude himself that a one-man D-ship was a hammock, or that space was a tropical beach.

But the sinecure element was there and the ships were solicitous cocoons, each with a climate designed

precisely for the lone occupant.

That each pilot carried the prison's bars in his mind had taken Beirut a long time to understand. Out here

aimed into the void beyond Capella Base, he could feel the bars where they had been dug into his

psyche, cemented and welded there. He blamed the operators of Bu-psych and the deep-sleep hypnotic

debriefing after each search trip. He told himself that Bu-psych did something to the helpless pilots then

installed this compulsion they called thePush.

Some young pilots managed to escape it for a while - tougher psyches, probably, but sooner or later,

Bu-psych got them all. It was a common compulsion that limited the time a D-ship pilot could stay out

before he turned tail and fled for home.

'This time I'll break away,' Beirut told himself. He knew he was talking aloud, but he had his computer's

vocoders turned off and his absent mumblings would be ignored.

The gas cloud of Grand Nuage loomed ahead of him, clearly defined on his instruments like a piece of

torn fabric thrown across the stars. He'd come out of subspace dangerously close, but that was the

gamble he'd taken.

Bingaling Benar, fellow pilot and sometime friend, had called him nuts when Beirut had said he was going

to tackle the cloud.

'Didn't you do that once before?' Bingaling asked.

'I was going to once, but I changed my mind,' Beirut had said.

'You gotta slow down, practically crawl in there,' Bingaling had said. 'I stood it in eighty-one days, man.

I had the push for real - couldn't take any more and I came home. Anyway, it's nothing but cloud all the

way through.'

Bingaling'sendless cloud was growing larger in the ship's instruments now. But the cloud enclosed a

mass of space that could hide a thousand suns.

Eighty-one days,he thought.

'Eighty, ninety days, that's all anyone can take out there,' Bingaling had said. 'And I'm telling you, in that

cloud it's worse. You get the push practically the minute you go in.'

Beirut had his ship down to a safe speed now, nosing into the first tenuous layers. There was no mystery

about the cloud's composition, he reminded himself. It was hydrogen, but in a concentration that made

swift flight suicidal.

'They got this theory,' Bingaling had said, 'that it's an embryo star like. One day it's just going to go

fwoosh and compress down into one star mass.'

Beirut eased the controls. He could sense his ship around him like an extension of his own nerves. She

was a pinnacle class for which he and his fellow pilots had a simple and obscene nickname - two hundred

and fifty meters long, crowded from nose to tubes with the equipment for determining if a planet could

support human life. In the sleep-freeze compartment directly behind him were the double-checks - two

pairs of rhesus monkeys and ten pairs of white mice.

D-ship pilots contended they'd seeded more planets with rhesus monkeys and white mice than they had

with humans.

Beirut switched to his stern instruments. One hour into the cloud and already the familiar stars behind him

were beginning to fuzz off. He felt the first stirrings of unease; not the push ... but disquiet.

He crossed his arms, touching the question-mark insignia at his left shoulder. He could feel the ripe green

film of corrosion on the brass threads.I should polish up, he thought. But he knew he wouldn't. He

looked around him at the pilot compartment, seeing unracked food cannisters, a grease smear across the

computer console, dirty fatigues wadded under a dolly seat.

It was a sloppy ship.

Beirut knew what was said about him and his fellow pilots back in the top echelons of the D-Service.

'Rogues make the best searchers.'

It was an axiom, but the rogues had their drawbacks. They flouted rules, sneered at protocol, ignored

timetables, laughed at vector search plans ... and kept sloppy ships. And when they disappeared - as

they often did - the Service could never be sure what had happened or where.

Except that the man had been prevented from returning ... because there was always the push.

Beirut shook his head. Every thought seemed to come back to the push. He didn't have it yet, he

assured himself. Too soon. But the thought was there, aroused. It was the fault of that cloud.

He re-activated the rear scanners. The familiar stars were gone, swallowed in a blanket of nothingness.

Angrily, he turned off the scanner switch.

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Frank Herbert - Escape Felicity

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