LIFE GOES ON, by Nelson Bond

Originally published in No Time Like the Future, 1954.

After an unguessed time, Carruthers stirred. After uncounted hours of black nothingness, Carruthers stirred and rose and looked about. He stood upon the crest of what appeared to be a monstrous crag, the rocky hilltop of some pebble in the sky, a lonely land unmarked by human artifact. Above, the vault of airless space was spangled by the fierce, eternal stars: Aldebaran and Vega, Betelgeuse and Deneb. Carruthers scanned them with a spaceman’s eyes.

“Well,” he said, “at least I’m in the solar system. But where? For all I know—”

He paused abruptly, startled and dismayed. He had voiced his thoughts aloud. Yet though his body ached with cosmic cold, no hoarfrost film of breath appeared before his lips… Nor had he heard his spoken words!

A sudden terror gripped him. He whispered hoarsely, “This is it, then? I’m dead?”

He lifted his hands, held them before his searching eyes. Strong, sun-bronzed, muscular hands, they did not seem to bear the fleshless fingers of a fearful ghost. But—

—But how could one living move and sense and feel… and yet not breathe or hear?

Carruthers groaned, and with an effort forced his tortured mind down the gray, sluggish paths of recollection…

Remembrance surged back slowly. Winterby and himself, the sole survivors of the crash that wrecked the spaceship Catapult, Earthbound from Saturn. The dreadful panic of that final hour. The frantic haste with which they cast off from the dying ship in the only undamaged lifeskiff. Then the slow days of aimless wanderings through the void as fuel tanks drained and rations dwindled low, hope waning within them as sextant readings showed the nearest human colony to be so far away that while one man might reach its haven alone, two must surely die for lack of food and drink and precious oxygen.

And then the hour when, roused from fitful sleep, he struggled to one elbow to find the wolf-lean face of Winterby above his own, to feel the hands of Winterby at his throat. The other spaceman’s lips were thin and hard.

“It’s you or me, Carruthers. There’s not enough of anything for both of us. Maybe I can make it alone. So—”

Then came the blow.

What happened next was like an evil dream. Numbed and half-conscious, Carruthers felt his companion half lift, half roll him to the airlock, slam the gate and press the lever that expelled the port. The outer lock-gate clanged back in its groove, the icy silence and the cold of space rushed in. The emptiness sucked Carruthers to its still embrace, stifling his half-drawn breath, his leaping pulse, stilling his heart, his very thoughts. Then nothingness…

And that was all—till now.

Now he stood upon the rim of a stark hill upon a mote of matter whirling in the infinite debris of space. He stood without breathing, with unbeating heart; he existed in an airless, heatless void; a living paradox: one who endured despite the unendurable.

So went Don Carruthers’ thoughts.

“I’m dead, of course,” he said to himself. “But—can this be death? Death should be a sleep and a forgetting. A final peace. How can the dead feel hatred as I do? Winterby!” He growled the name. “If I could only meet him once again. Winterby—”

He stopped. A voice, so thin it seemed the whisper from a dream, spoke words not of his mind’s imagining.

“Carruthers—”

Startled, Dan Carruthers whirled. No living creature stood within the circle of his searching gaze.

“Carruthers—”

“Who speaks?” Carruthers cried. “Who calls my name?”

The soft voice answered, and suddenly Carruthers realized it was not one but many tongues that spoke. Nor were they really tongues as men know tongues, because the bee-thin echo rose within himself. It stirred along his veins, his ganglia, through his neural passages as through the wires of a power line hums the insistent current of a dynamo.

The voices said, “We are not one entity, but many brethren, infinitely small, who have waited upon this gray and lifeless shard of rock for untold eons. We are sentient but fleshless. Until now we have lain immobile, unable to find body for that personality which is ourselves.

“Now, at last, the way to life has opened to us. When a short time ago your body drifted to our prison rock, chance offered us a vehicle in which to dwell, and spawn, and live, and grow.”

“You are—in me?” choked Carruthers, appalled.

“We are not merely in you; we are you. It is our life-force that lifts your stumbling body to its feet, enabling it to move. Your memories are ours, as soon ours will be yours. Our brethren flood your brain-cells as on your native Earth in spring a hive is overrun with swarming bees.

“We are an ancient race reborn in you. Your flesh provides for us a citadel in which to breed and live again.”

“Then that is why I do not have to breathe in airless space?” stammered Carruthers. “That is why I stand in subzero cold and still do not turn to ice?”

The answer came back softly: “That is why. The personality which was yourself, Carruthers, is no more. Only your fleshly housing still endures.

“But do not fear, or give in to despair. The change is great, but it brings recompense. Our host will always worship at the shrine of your great godhood which has given us life—and in the fullness of the years to come, you, too, will share the glory of our race.”

“Glory!” cried Carruthers bitterly. “What kind of glory is this? I’d rather die outright than be a walking corpse, the deathless host of spawning parasites. Let me die! Give me a swift and clean destruction. Let me end this grim travesty on death.”

He struggled to throw himself forward, willing his limbs to hurl his body from the hilltop to the crags that lay below. But he could not move. The minuscule intelligences gripped his muscles in a band of steel, and through his veins the gentle voices coursed:

“Don’t be afraid, Carruthers. For a little while your brain may be tormented, true. But soon all human trends of thought will vanish; then you will be truly one with us. Our dreams will be your dreams, our thoughts your thoughts; our racial memories will be part and parcel of yourself.

“Behold, within this little time already you have grasped a portion of our stranger lore. Open your mind to us, Carruthers. Read our past.”

Carruthers let the voices have their will.

The invisible swarm within him spoke the truth. As one who drifts in fever-haunted dreams, Carruthers felt himself to be a dancing spore no denser than a sunbeam. Lithe and free, unhampered by a fleshly covering, he found himself afloat in darkling space. Whence he came he could not guess, nor where his destination lay. But deep within his sentience dwelt a knowledge, deep and strong, that he must float until that time when he and those who swirled about him in a filmy cloud should come to rest upon a fertile world where there was water, earth and sustenance.

There, instinct told him, he must seek a living cell, within it take root and lend to it his quota of intelligence, that it and he might merge and he infuse its protoplasmic ignorance in order that from its primeval blob, in ages hence, might Man evolve…

The vision faded. Carruthers murmured softly to himself, “There was an Earthly scientist, Arrhenius by name. Long years ago he voiced the theory that from a source unguessably remote in time and space throughout the void, are universally diffused the spores of life, which, when they find a resting place which will sustain them, spawn and germinate. Then—this is what you are? And what I have become companion to?”

He did not need their assenting response. He knew without it he had guessed the truth. And with the assurance came a quietude, an acquiescence to the master plan of someone—or of something—greater than himself.

And yet—yet there was part of him which remained a human still. For in his heart still burned a human flame, the fierce and unforgotten fire of hate. That he must die… while Winterby, his murderer, still lived, this was the thing that filled him with dark fury.

Winterby—He sensed a quickening along his peopled veins, as those who were a part of him were stirred by his emotions as he had been by theirs. And to himself he voiced the silent thought, “If I could only meet him once again, for but the briefest moment—”

“You can, Carruthers,” said the voices.

“I can?”

“But certainly. You have but to will the deed, and with the speed of light your resurrected body now can span the farthest reaches of the vault of space.

“A short time since, this enemy of yours whisked by our rock in his metallic skiff. Pursue him if it pleases you to do so. We who are your friends, care not.”

Carruthers whirled; his arms rose high. And like an arrow speeding from a bow, his body flashed into the yawning void.

Brief was the journey; in an instant’s time Carruthers hovered once again beside the fleeing skiff. Inside, contentedly unaware, Winterby drank in celebration of his triumph. Drank and laughed and lifted high a glass in mocking toast.

“To you, Carruthers! Too bad it had to be this way. But it was you or me, and I could not—”

His laughter ended in a sudden gasp. The wine glass fell and splintered on the deck as through the cabin doorway stepped the man whose body he had jettisoned into space.

“Carruthers!”

Carruthers’ voice was cold and grating.

“Yes, Winterby. I have come back—for you.”

“But you—you can’t come back!” screamed Winterby. “I killed you. You’re dead, Carruthers; dead!”

Carruthers nodded grimly.

“True. But even so, I have you as companion.”

“No!” cried Winterby. From its holster he tugged a heat gun. “Go back! Wherever you came from, go back!” he cried—and pressed the stud.

A tongue of flame lashed out to bathe Carruthers in a flood of lethal coruscation. A hole that widened like a sloughing sore appeared in Dan Carruthers’ breast; the stench of burning flesh was nauseous. But Carruthers felt no pain. Laughing, he moved steadily forward on the other man.

In vain Winterby hurled his gun away and scrambled for the air lock, reckless of the certain doom awaiting him outside. Carruthers’ hands were icy as they closed about the throat of him who had once been shipmate and friend. The strong fingers tightened, froze, relaxed, expelled. And Winterby slipped lifeless to the deck…

Then slowly said Carruthers to himself, “Now there are two of us, both doomed, both dead. Two lifeless bodies fit for clay and worms—upon the Earth we sprang from.

“But out here there is a better purpose we two can serve. Within my carcass—soon, perhaps, in his as well—reside the fecund spores of life: Life which, if given an opportunity, can people a new planet, a new world. A better world, it may be, than the one which gave us birth.

“I am not sure. Already, now, the thoughts which were Carruthers’ fade and merge. I am becoming, as they said I would, a part of themselves as they are part of me. Before it is too late, then, there is one final gift I can give them; one last service I can render to the spores—”

He turned to the control-board of the skiff. With slow, uncertain hands he set the dials, establishing a new trajectory. Setting a course toward a distant spot in space where, between the orbits of red Mars and mighty Jupiter, a host of lifeless asteroids pursue their endless rounds about the mother Sun.

“Here we will find,” mused Dan Carruthers, now one with his symbiotic guests, “water and food and air. On Iris, Ceres, Pollux we will breed—and in the centuries that lie ahead, evolve into our destined perfect form.”

So whispered Dan Carruthers. Then he fell. A myriad bee-thin voices sang his dirge.

All this was long ago. In later days men marveled to discover crawling life upon the erstwhile sterile planetoids. Marveled, and in their blind complacence did not see that on one far and distant future day when their empire had toppled, from these rocks would spring anew the hardy seed of Man.

Thus two men died that Man might always live. Thus life was born upon the asteroids…