The Voyage of Vanishing Men — Story, Setting & Ideas

Angular as a stick-bug, he stood at the bar, elbows digging into the polished mahogany, one foot cocked on the rail. He was drinking alone as if it had become a habit, and the customers edged away from him as if not wanting to make it too obvious. As usual, his go-to-hell face looked past you into the backbar mirror and out again to cover the whole place. He was older and changed, though, as he would be. Deep lines furrowed the tight, tanned, leathery features, and his eyes still held some of that awful emptiness of space between the star-packs.

Nobody said anything, at first.

Braun watched them, a humorous half-defiant glint in his eye. But there was pain in him, in his voice as he spoke.

"What's the matter? Am I poison, or something?"

Somebody said it, then. In a stage whisper. "I had friends on the _Venture IV_."

"So did I," Braun answered quickly. "A lot of friends. So before somebody works up nerve to ask, I don't know."

"Don't know?" a man named Cutter pursued the point coldly. "You were there!..."

"I was there," admitted Braun. "I still say it. I don't know what happened to anybody. I've told the authorities that over and over. I've told anybody who'd listen. You don't have to believe me. I don't give a--"

"Nobody's told us anything," Cutter insisted. "We haven't heard a whisper about it. And, speaking for all of us, we'd like to be sure about you ... before we go on drinking at the same bar...."

It was going to be like that as long as Braun lived. People will talk, and if there's a choice, they'll guess the ugly thing, every time. Wherever he went, there would be people to ask that question, and somebody to smirk if he answered it.

You could see trouble coming. Whatever Braun answered....

Braun was never a man to talk much about himself. It was always the places he had been and seen, or wanted to go. Like all old-time spacemen, he was a bird of passage. Between trips, he came in a few times, got to be a fixture. But he was always coming or going somewhere never lighting or staying put.

You don't learn too much about a man in a bar, casually. Little things add up and hint at the bigger ones. You can call him by his first name casually, and hash over mutual acquaintances, that's all.

Maybe you talk about the things men talk about. Life and death. Men and spaceships. Life on distant worlds. Braun had knocked around the galaxy like a lot of people since the DuMont space-time drive came into general use. He had seen more than the ordinary man even dreams about, but there was always a restless and curious wondering about more distant stars and their planets. On one classic occasion, you even helped him wonder about other galaxies, and if the new drive would ever take men out into the far, dark spaces where ships never ventured.

When Braun's big break came, you heard about it from someone else, since Braun was far away, at a planet-base circling a star that was just a number in a catalog. There were no formal goodbyes out there, just technical admonitions. Then a speck diminished into nowhere, with no instruments to track an object accelerating into speeds so many times greater than light that mathematics became weird paradoxes, and nothing existing in normal dimensions even makes sense.

Eventually the ship came back, and Braun with it. Nobody knew much more than that. No official announcements were made, no actual denials or accusations. Rumor hinted at ugliness, and an investigation going on. People made the usual wild and extravagant guesses, and there were the formless whispers that start nowhere and end nowhere.

Braun put his back to the bar and looked over the crowd soberly, one by one. This must have happened to him many times before, as it probably would again. Braun had his own way of dealing with such situations, and maybe he was right.

"I don't know what happened," he said slowly. "I'll say it again, just once. I don't know. If you don't like it, I'm here, waiting. One at a time, or the whole ratpack of you. How do you want it?"

In any real, deadly brawl, voices are rarely raised. There is no loud and explosive discussion. Instead, all movement jells, crystallizes in utter silence. Something breaks it. Something like a flung beermug. Then comes a five-ring circus of action.

Braun ducked. The beermug struck in foaming, splintering destruction. The backbar mirror dissolved in a chiming avalanche of glass.